I don't use my real name on the Internet, yet I contribute intelligently to discussions and don't troll.
Be careful with that strategy; you may be throwing out a lot of baby with the bathwater. Not everyone refuses to use their real name online for nefarious purposes.
Look what happened to MySQL, leading to the need to fork to MariaDB.
Look what happened to ZFS; as soon as Oracle got its grubby mitts on it, it closed-sourced all future updates and made it incompatible with the open source version.
Do you use Solaris? If you do, I don't even have to write anything here. Support has gone absolutely to shit since the acquisition.
And now Virtualbox is stagnant and uncared for.
Why is anyone surprised? Oracle bought Sun and ruined everything awesome about the company. It was the absolute worst possible company that could have acquired Sun, and it shows in every way.
Fuck you, Oracle. With a turbo-charged chainsaw, sideways.
The VLB card connector was really long and would sometimes make a poor connection or start to pop out. Hot glue was a common hack to make sure the card stayed in, and it was reversible (just heat the glue and pop it out).
I remember VIP 486 boards. VESA-LB, ISA and PCI in one motherboard. Very awesome if you had a really expensive VLB video card that you didn't want to part with quite yet, but wanted to upgrade to a system with PCI.:)
This has been the case for years. For ages and ages I've seen home routers with crappy firmware that results in bad connectivity. NAT table entries timing out too soon, inability to handle VPN traffic, crashes, lock-ups, performance slowdowns, the works.
This is why for years I've been running a full blown Linux machine as a router. Plenty of performance and memory, never any issues. It makes me wonder why more router manufacturers don't use Linux or BSD derivatives for their firmware instead of writing garbage in-house.
Are you telling me that PC vendors these days ship systems without a way to recover them from bare metal? That's... insane. Utterly stark raving mad.
Even Macs, which don't ship with install media, can do a bare metal restore downloading the operating system from the Internet. This is common sense shit!
With older (PPC?) based Macs, to update the firmware you had to power off the machine, then turn it on by holding the power button until you got an extra beep or sound. This would physically un-write-protect the firmware EPROM so that it could be updated by open firmware.
In their quest to make everything as "user friendly" as possible, they took out this hardware security feature, allowing the update to just happen without any physical action.
Hotels will make you pay just to use an electrical outlet in a meeting room.
They charge for every little tiny thing, simply because business execs will just sign off on all of it and not care about a "paltry" $100 "outlet usage" fee.
Meanwhile, these fees can be big problems for smaller budget conventions, such as fandom cons. The artist alley at half the furry cons I've been to have a policy keeping artists from plugging in their stuff to charge because the con gets dinged hundreds of dollars in penalties by the hotel.
It truly is a non-customer-friendly business if you're not a big company flush with cash.
We have a load control transponder here which allows the power company to temporarily shut off the air conditioner and/or water heater, basically creating a "rolling blackout" of just those devices when demand for power exceeds supply.
The fact that they deploy such devices suggests utilities would be happy to shed some load, especially during the brightest time of day when solar works best and air conditioners are working hardest.
So what's the deal? They want us to use more power after all?
Lead acid batteries last longest when they are fully charged and kept that way, and discharged infrequently. This makes them excellent for use in standby power situations, where they are almost always topped up ready for the power to go out.
Li-Ion batteries last longest when they are actively used. Keeping a Li-Ion battery fully charged all the time is bad for its longevity; the battery structure breaks down faster at a high state of charge. This is why it is recommended to store Li-Ion batteries half-charged in a cold environment, and why cars like the Tesla Model S normally only charge up to 80% unless you require a "full-range charge" for a road trip. Not topping off to 100% extends battery life.
Maybe Facebook intends to keep the batteries at 80%, but it's hard to believe the economics are going to work in their favor.
Not to mention that lead-acid batteries are mostly water and non-combustible sulfuric acid. A Li-Ion battery fire is 50 times nastier than a lead-acid battery fire, and produces a hell of a lot more noxious gases.
I truly don't understand this. When I was a young awkward geek with very specific interests, I would have absolutely LOVED there to be women around with those same interests. Us guys totally loved the few geeky girls that were around and always wished there were more.
Yet today we see guys trying to scare the women away. What the hell changed?
I suspect they derped the packaging of the release. Its behavior highly suggests missing files or wrong versions.
It's still inexcusable though. Updates should be pushed to a few dozen people inside the company to test the possibility of showstoppers like this one.
>-always try to arrange so you owe a little money come tax time
This this this this this.
You can tweak your allowances with your employer so you always get a small tax bill. No worries about losing your refund money, AND you get the money throughout the year instead of in a lump sum.
Some idiots claim they like receiving that check every year, that it's a nice "bonus", when in actuality it's just you lending Uncle Sam your hard earned money interest free and getting the loan repaid in April. I keep hearing about people with refunds well into the four figures, and want to slap them silly.
I bet the IRS wouldn't give YOU an interest free loan if you stopped withholding... why should you give THEM one?
>technical question like listing all the container classes in STL from the top of my head
Do experienced devs even know this? I've programmed in several languages and I could never give a list of functions on demand. That's what reference material is for.
You honestly dodged a bullet with that one; any company that asks for such a thing has a damaged tech culture.
The funny thing is I was told all the time growing up that I was "extremely smart" and "gifted", when in reality, I didn't FEEL like I was.
Sure, I could do things with computers that few of the other kids could do, like program and build things. But I don't think I was "smart". I just LIKED doing those things, so I did them all the time, and thus became really good at those things.
Meanwhile, you could ask me to cook a meal at the time and I'd completely fail because I never cooked. I didn't enjoy it, and was thus lousy at it.
I don't think I was unusually "smart" or "gifted". I just got obsessed with computers and technology, so I got good at those things.
Everything requires an E-mail account. You need an E-mail account to make a Facebook, Google, Apple, etc. account. It's the "out of band" communications method with which someone can be reached that is universal and not tied to any specific company or provider.
If E-mail has to go away, something else needs to replace it in this manner. Phone numbers could be one way; there's already services that exclusively use phone numbers to authenticate (Telegram messenger for instance). The problem is most people, including myself, don't want to give their phone number out to everyone. E-mail, I could care less, or create a throwaway account.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't use my real name on the Internet, yet I contribute intelligently to discussions and don't troll.
Be careful with that strategy; you may be throwing out a lot of baby with the bathwater. Not everyone refuses to use their real name online for nefarious purposes.
That company ruins everything it touches.
Look what happened to MySQL, leading to the need to fork to MariaDB.
Look what happened to ZFS; as soon as Oracle got its grubby mitts on it, it closed-sourced all future updates and made it incompatible with the open source version.
Do you use Solaris? If you do, I don't even have to write anything here. Support has gone absolutely to shit since the acquisition.
And now Virtualbox is stagnant and uncared for.
Why is anyone surprised? Oracle bought Sun and ruined everything awesome about the company. It was the absolute worst possible company that could have acquired Sun, and it shows in every way.
Fuck you, Oracle. With a turbo-charged chainsaw, sideways.
....and it's a much better service overall, being available on many platforms, syncing conversations and best of all not owned by Facebook.
They're referring to the recent drama where Social Justice Warriors are pissed at Linus because he said he "didn't care about diversity."
What he meant is that he doesn't care who the code comes from, just that it's good code. Which is the right way to do things.
That was the reliable way to run the DX50, because VLB was unreliable at 50MHz. You were lucky to be able to afford something so kick-ass back then!
I bet you ran DOOM at 60FPS! ;)
The VLB card connector was really long and would sometimes make a poor connection or start to pop out. Hot glue was a common hack to make sure the card stayed in, and it was reversible (just heat the glue and pop it out).
It truly was a dark age. But we all loved it. :)
I remember VIP 486 boards. VESA-LB, ISA and PCI in one motherboard. Very awesome if you had a really expensive VLB video card that you didn't want to part with quite yet, but wanted to upgrade to a system with PCI. :)
This has been the case for years. For ages and ages I've seen home routers with crappy firmware that results in bad connectivity. NAT table entries timing out too soon, inability to handle VPN traffic, crashes, lock-ups, performance slowdowns, the works.
This is why for years I've been running a full blown Linux machine as a router. Plenty of performance and memory, never any issues. It makes me wonder why more router manufacturers don't use Linux or BSD derivatives for their firmware instead of writing garbage in-house.
Are you telling me that PC vendors these days ship systems without a way to recover them from bare metal? That's... insane. Utterly stark raving mad.
Even Macs, which don't ship with install media, can do a bare metal restore downloading the operating system from the Internet. This is common sense shit!
With older (PPC?) based Macs, to update the firmware you had to power off the machine, then turn it on by holding the power button until you got an extra beep or sound. This would physically un-write-protect the firmware EPROM so that it could be updated by open firmware.
In their quest to make everything as "user friendly" as possible, they took out this hardware security feature, allowing the update to just happen without any physical action.
Bad Apple, no donut.
Hotels will make you pay just to use an electrical outlet in a meeting room.
They charge for every little tiny thing, simply because business execs will just sign off on all of it and not care about a "paltry" $100 "outlet usage" fee.
Meanwhile, these fees can be big problems for smaller budget conventions, such as fandom cons. The artist alley at half the furry cons I've been to have a policy keeping artists from plugging in their stuff to charge because the con gets dinged hundreds of dollars in penalties by the hotel.
It truly is a non-customer-friendly business if you're not a big company flush with cash.
We have a load control transponder here which allows the power company to temporarily shut off the air conditioner and/or water heater, basically creating a "rolling blackout" of just those devices when demand for power exceeds supply.
The fact that they deploy such devices suggests utilities would be happy to shed some load, especially during the brightest time of day when solar works best and air conditioners are working hardest.
So what's the deal? They want us to use more power after all?
Lead acid batteries last longest when they are fully charged and kept that way, and discharged infrequently. This makes them excellent for use in standby power situations, where they are almost always topped up ready for the power to go out.
Li-Ion batteries last longest when they are actively used. Keeping a Li-Ion battery fully charged all the time is bad for its longevity; the battery structure breaks down faster at a high state of charge. This is why it is recommended to store Li-Ion batteries half-charged in a cold environment, and why cars like the Tesla Model S normally only charge up to 80% unless you require a "full-range charge" for a road trip. Not topping off to 100% extends battery life.
Maybe Facebook intends to keep the batteries at 80%, but it's hard to believe the economics are going to work in their favor.
Not to mention that lead-acid batteries are mostly water and non-combustible sulfuric acid. A Li-Ion battery fire is 50 times nastier than a lead-acid battery fire, and produces a hell of a lot more noxious gases.
The original twin towers DID use robotic window washers. They were built in 1971.
This problem has already been resolved, but they didn't design the new building in a way that robotic window washers could be implemented easily.
Oops.
Drones are so much fun and you can get so many cool photos and video from them.
Yet these morons flying drones near airports are going to ruin it for everyone. Expect to see them heavily regulated or banned soon.
This is why we can't have nice things. :(
...is like using a steam engine to power a car. It's clunky, inefficient, and outmoded.
WHY??????? HTML5 can play audio directly.
Now people will just go out of state to buy Teslas, and thus the tax revenue will go to another state.
This is a case where someone didn't think things through.
I truly don't understand this. When I was a young awkward geek with very specific interests, I would have absolutely LOVED there to be women around with those same interests. Us guys totally loved the few geeky girls that were around and always wished there were more.
Yet today we see guys trying to scare the women away. What the hell changed?
Why the hell did the industry move away from using red LEDs for power indicators?
It really is the best color for that. It's clearly visible, doesn't mess up dark adaptation, and red LEDs are the cheapest.
I suspect they derped the packaging of the release. Its behavior highly suggests missing files or wrong versions.
It's still inexcusable though. Updates should be pushed to a few dozen people inside the company to test the possibility of showstoppers like this one.
>-always try to arrange so you owe a little money come tax time
This this this this this.
You can tweak your allowances with your employer so you always get a small tax bill. No worries about losing your refund money, AND you get the money throughout the year instead of in a lump sum.
Some idiots claim they like receiving that check every year, that it's a nice "bonus", when in actuality it's just you lending Uncle Sam your hard earned money interest free and getting the loan repaid in April. I keep hearing about people with refunds well into the four figures, and want to slap them silly.
I bet the IRS wouldn't give YOU an interest free loan if you stopped withholding... why should you give THEM one?
>technical question like listing all the container classes in STL from the top of my head
Do experienced devs even know this? I've programmed in several languages and I could never give a list of functions on demand. That's what reference material is for.
You honestly dodged a bullet with that one; any company that asks for such a thing has a damaged tech culture.
I can't believe they're still using ATM. I mean, seriously what is this 1996?
The funny thing is I was told all the time growing up that I was "extremely smart" and "gifted", when in reality, I didn't FEEL like I was.
Sure, I could do things with computers that few of the other kids could do, like program and build things. But I don't think I was "smart". I just LIKED doing those things, so I did them all the time, and thus became really good at those things.
Meanwhile, you could ask me to cook a meal at the time and I'd completely fail because I never cooked. I didn't enjoy it, and was thus lousy at it.
I don't think I was unusually "smart" or "gifted". I just got obsessed with computers and technology, so I got good at those things.
Everything requires an E-mail account. You need an E-mail account to make a Facebook, Google, Apple, etc. account. It's the "out of band" communications method with which someone can be reached that is universal and not tied to any specific company or provider.
If E-mail has to go away, something else needs to replace it in this manner. Phone numbers could be one way; there's already services that exclusively use phone numbers to authenticate (Telegram messenger for instance). The problem is most people, including myself, don't want to give their phone number out to everyone. E-mail, I could care less, or create a throwaway account.
E-mail is too useful. It needs to stick around.