It's easy to see Android's success and think Linux wasn't already taking things over by storm long before.
Sorry, but the reason Android is not only possible but exceedingly stable and featureful now, on pretty much any device that the manufacturer wants to support Android, is because of over a decade of progressively more mature hobbyist and then later commercial Linux support for embedded ARM systems.
What, you think all that hardware support and architecture specific corner case fixing just happened overnight? If you do, it's apparent you've not seen the competing platforms and how exceedingly limited and crippled they are regarding support.
We're talking about everything from Trolltech/Qtopia or Maemo to Debian ARM and esoteric distributions like Angstrom. Linux has been around this block a couple times.
Linux has been "crap" for well over a decade, in the sense that it has never made much headway against competing OSes in some key markets
"much headway in some key markets" is kind of insignificant to the big picture when you almost completely own the majority of others. Linux has been the name in town for what seems like the better part of a decade now for embedded, consumer, and web server systems - and now also virtualization for as long as VMWare has been around in any useable form (about 7 years?). Guess what? You don't have to dominate every single market to be a market player.
I don't know what kind of asinine point the GP was trying to make about Microsoft by bringing up Steve Jobs (the man had neither technical merit or a set of morals you could identify, if you could find them). But his point that OS X took the better part of a decade before it was anything but useless crap, from an OS/software engineering perspective? True, and still mostly true. It's also increasingly true in a useability perspective, sadly.
Re:It's just training for future geekery
on
Has Lego Sold Out?
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· Score: 2
At least for me, it was never the 'common bricks' that made LEGOs awesome. Yes, they were necessary, but they weren't why you wanted a set, and weren't the "cool part" which allowed you to make certain kinds of vehicles, buildings, etc.
For instance, the 'space wheels'. Surely I wasn't the only person who fought with my siblings over the 'better' pieces?
(Those common bricks aren't all that common anymore, anyway.)
Re:It's just training for future geekery
on
Has Lego Sold Out?
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· Score: 1
As the father of a budding 9 year old geek, let me just say: yeah, pretty much.
He loves LEGOS, and makes all kinds of things. The last thing he made was an RV - you know, the 41' pull behind 'camper' kind. He's also made the moon rover, and many other things I had to think "huh, I didn't know he had the right kind/enough parts to do that".
Yes, he has gone back and remade the castles etc. from the manual a couple times. Then he reconfigures them, rebuilds them, mixes them, and so on.
By the way, LEGO blocks are stupidly expensive. Has anyone looked at the pricing lately? A 'basic' set is going to run you over $100! I can't imagine (or believe) it used to be priced like that when I was a kid. I, for one, would not have had parents who could've or would've afforded them. (This is one of the reasons I am grateful he has graduated on to Minecraft!)
Regarding 'learning to forget the manual', knowing manual - or at least, the basic set of rules with which you're working - has its place. I recently took apart, and fixed a spendy multi-remote control (for household electronics). The manual itself wasn't of any use, but knowing how the shells on devices is usually fit together, where to look for screws, etc. was immensely useful - it saved a good half an hour of prying and the like which would've deformed the thing. The experiences gained by figuring out how these things piece together was indeed useful (though they don't put that in a manual - they should).
Minecraft is LEGO on crack, I'm finding. It's like LEGO meets an RTS meets an RPG meets a FPS. I refuse to play it the kids because I don't like what I'm sure I'd become.
As someone who administers AIX but am historically from the Linux side of things, I have seen quite a few oddities on this supposedly-stable OS of IBM's, AIX.
I have seen the kernel get clobbered by authentication systems and PAM, repeatedly. It doesn't handle OOM conditions nearly as well as Linux does (though you can tune it to a similar degree, if only because Linux borrowed a lot from their implementation). I've seen a great deal more erratic behavior (eg. daemons crashing, lack of responsiveness, etc.) on AIX when approaching OOM conditions (with or without swap - just whenever the slab space is almost all used) than I ever have on Linux.
If it were so stable, it wouldn't need patching primarily for stability as regularly as it does from IBM. Sorry, but from where I'm sitting, AIX has a lot more patches being released for a great deal more things than RHEL does, for very basic things. IMO, the biggest reason AIX is even used specifically is due to legacy, and institutional knowledge - AIX knowledge doesn't go as stale as quickly as Linux distro-specific knowledge does, because nothing ever changes - ever - on AIX, they just add more stuff.
And, of course, the hardware AIX runs on is pretty much just pure awesomeness. That's the biggest reason AIX should even be considered.
(Funny enough, the VIO and/or HMC on most "AIX" equipment appears to be some neutered and highly customized version of SuSE, so technically, AIX can only really be as stable as Linux is.)
How do you figure it's too cheap? Compared to what?
Asian airlines fly the same (or newer) planes. They've got all the same hard requirements for fuel, etc. Their flights are not as jam packed as the US flights are, but yet they still cost MUCH less. It's also less of a headache regarding security, scheduling, and pretty much everything else (even with a language barrier).
And yes, pre-9/11, airline security was (partially) done by the airlines. The FAA, popular culture ("appease them and they'll let you live"), and the US military were responsible for not acting reactively in the scenario. There was nothing the airlines could've done (aside from not enforcing the restriction of firearm laws) to prevent 9/11 because they simply didn't have the power.
It's not truthful to blame the airlines for 9/11 and say the gov't 'fixed' it. IT was, after all, the gov't that allowed the jihadists to come to the US in the first place...
I've got to disagree with you here. The founding fathers didn't write, as far as I know, of "general self defense" as a reason for why the right to keep arms should be maintained. The right to self defense was, to them, so common sense that they didn't even conceive it to be written. They were primarily concerned about averting the cause of tyranny.
Keep in mind, these were people who came from a culture where dueling to the death over honor occurred, and warfare was fought basically as an orchestrated duel amongst large groups of men. They did think very differently than we do.:) (Remember, some of the founding fathers even wanted to institute Washington as the King of America.)
Their world was one of an all-powerful sovereign government (ie, "ordained by God"). England, the Crown, the Church, and the Will of God were synonymous. While I agree that self-defense was a prerequisite, it most certainly wasn't a conscious primary cause for the 2nd Amendment. It was keeping the contention of men who would rule over others at bay.
Serious analysis has always basically said (as I understand it) urban poverty preceeds crime". Said another way, crime increases as people cease being mutually reliant upon their neighbors. DC, for instance, is very impoverished, urban, and not mutually dependent. ND has never been not impoverished so there's nothing to proceed it, but it's also very rural and people need to be reliant upon their neighbors - everyone knows everyone's business.
What's interesting is that it's been suggested recently that the massive spikes in gun ownership and concealed carry laws being passed is that despite increased poverty in certain areas, national (violent) crime rates have actually dropped.
I don't know if you actually remember the first iPhone, but it was similarly horrid. Not only was the build quality very low, but it had no networking capabilities to speak of, and everything had to be sideloaded. It was a full two or more product iterations behind the Windows CE phones (and handsets) of the day with not even a fraction of the applications - basically, it fed off the success of the iPod, "an iPod with phone features".
How quickly we forget how things really were... it wasn't until Android came about that Apple started to get their act together, "hey, we might have some competition in the image department".
Nonsense, it doesn't matter if you're good at the "people" side of things if you're the person everyone is looking to to help them survive.
Short of being surrounded by like-minded people, you're going to have to rely on ordinaries. Ordinaries will need you, too.
There is only one way to avoid the long running blood fueds and eventually being wiped out. It's to build a new Empire of a single, cooperative and cohesive culture with its own internal enforcement structure. Think the Romans or the Khans.
That said, it's all moot once you die. Guns, ammo, MREs, etc. are short term (albeit single lifetime) thinking. Most people aren't going to think much beyond one or two generations.
Another way to look at this would be to consider the guns per gun related homicide numbers. In the US, there are approximated 89k guns per 100k people, giving a guns per gun-homicide ratio of 24k guns per gun-homicide. Serbia, the #2 country for guns per capita has approximately 58k guns per 100k people, giving them a guns per gun-homicide rate of 93k guns per gun-homicide.
So why not compare guns per gun homicide of the US vs. say, the UK? Or even use something much less culturally influenced, like comparing guns per gun homicide in a state like Florida or Texas (everyone everywhere has a gun or 12 and they have Thanksgiving Day shooting gettogethers) vs. a place like NY, DC, or IL (modern manufacture guns are all but banned)?
Minimal interest is what banks pay for simply allowing you to hold onto "your" money for you and use it for their interests.
It would be more than 'minimal interest', because it would be money used, under coercion, against their will, AGAINST their interests (sort of like taxes in many regards, really). So the interest rates on Payday loans seem more in keeping with the nature of the 'loan'.
Probably not just you. IOS is known for, what's the word... being consistently inconsistent? It works almost the same across a wide range of devices, except when it doesn't. Lots of little documented stuff. I've got a friend who's had to make calls in to 2nd and 1st level Cisco support before due to this happening; they're not even well versed on it within Cisco for the low end Enterprise stuff, just forget getting decent support on the SMB crap...
Yes, except Google has absolutely no reason to trust your cert more than one from a rooted box.
At least get one of the free certificates out there, with a valid certificate chain. That really is not that hard; in fact, it takes about 5 minutes if you've created a certificate before for anything.
What this move does is it eliminates all the rogue "I set up an SMTP server incidentally with my new slackware install" spam problems.
The impression I get is that most of the people getting W8 at this point are actually just IT departments at companies. Most people are avoiding W8 still if they're using computers at all - most people are seemingly switching to Android and even Apple tablets for 'primary computing', because they meet their needs.
I imagine the people who bought into Windows ME got pretty used to working around its egocentricity, too. Yes, I meant egocentricity.
Like with WinME, I suspect the statistics are somewhat skewed to show people 'adapting'. It's either that or die, right? And when you're the only three people left in the world who haven't put Windows 7 on the device, you kind of have a reputation to uphold for being the statistical outliers who adapt to what they're given than adapt their world to their existence. (Here's guessing they also own Macs.)
Joking aside, if this is all truthful and on the level, and isn't just a symptom of people backgrading to W7 or some such thing, this will mark yet another "modern operating system" I've been able to completely avoid. I haven't touched OS X for the better part of 5 years now; I have never touched an iPhone except briefly, and I'm a complete incompetent while using one (they're not all that intuitive, apparently). Maybe I'm doomed to be irrelevant in a couple years, but I somehow doubt it - I've familiarized with three new operating systems (to me) in the past year and demand for my skills is in no short supply.
When vendors continually marginalize the the talents of the people who work on their products instead of reinforcing them, they alienate themselves first and foremost. IBM knows this, and most of its products, as a result, never lose functionality (only gaining it, despite the frequent need for that functionality to be eliminated). The result is a bit of a mess, but it creates a mess which people can spend an entire career maintaining and fixing - not just the 'best and the brightest' or whatever, but normal people as well.
You'd think that Microsoft would've learned that, given that they've been the "starter OS" for technical people in recent years. While I understand MS wants to eliminate the need for technical people outright, it's not likely to ever* happen. It's just going to alienate MS.
On the other hand, the standardization would also limit designs and prevent some cutting edge innovations from being utilized.
No, I strongly disagree with this sentiment.
Standardization sets the baseline. Take HTML for instance. What if there was no openly accepted standard in the early days? It'd have taken a lot longer for things to take off; the improvements, variations, and deviations (MS HTML, VRML, HTML 4.0, etc.) would not have occurred. Everyone would've been attempting to (more or less) completely one-up the other person (see: Flash) and nobody would benefit until a monopoly were established, forcing everyone else out.
In the case of hardware: if you have a standard, then anyone can create components for it. Without the standard, it is essentially locked down. "We have a sound mixing device compatible with the board", "we have a video processor card compatible with the board", "we have an extended run battery pack for the board", and so on. If I recall correctly, having a simple hardware interface standard was what made Nintendo so wildly popular with the NES, back in the day (regarding things like controllers and other misc. input). While everyone else did crazy things to retain control and make it complicated, Nintendo made it a simple serial interface.
As someone who has attempted doing just this (albeit almost 7 years ago, now), let me just say: I want one. My ultimate goal was a 'laptop' which could be both always on and have a day or more worth of connectivity (massive battery). The biggest problem I ran into was trying to figure out how to make the case and how to interface a board with a monitor of suitable/proper size. Thankfully, options for monitors looks a little more mature nowadays with the prevalence of tablets, and ARM hardware has improved markedly as well while dropping in price.
The case is really what held me up. I had no idea how to get something useable with the materials I had. Fortunately, we have something now available to us which was not available then: printable 3D objects. If someone were to design a laptop chassis CAD file around one or two commonly available components (an inexpensive/common LCD panel, and the Lenovo UltraNav keyboard) we would be well on our way to something useable, I think. Make it 'shim layered' in design, so you print the whole thing out, reinforce it with metal (possibly thin metal rods/tubing in key structural tension points, like around the display bevel and longitudinally across the base
As for the board, I think SATA is mostly extraneous at this point for most laptops. miniPCIe is going to suit most needs for storage in a mobile device where USB and SD do not. The idea of having a rotating platter in a laptop is really quite extraneous and risky these days.
It's immensely useful, actually. It saves a lot of money on storage, particularly when it's quasi-archival storage (ie an archive which is accessed frequently, such as most of the data most people have for personal use). It's just not been historically all that cost effective (from a computing resource viewpoint) to implement and not all that stable, making even the inefficient "script and file based dedup" seem appealing.
No, that was never such a problem. Who cares about the badging? The problem was that Cisco tried to make Linksys products - which competed on price value first and foremost - into Cisco products - which compete on threat of failure and job security. Huge difference!
The problems were:
* they abandoned the home market through marketing and getting rid of all the products which appealed to home users * they increased the prices of the Linksys products - because, well, they're badged Cisco SMB now. * they didn't improve the Linksys products, they made most of them worse (the latest SMB routers are completely useless; I'd rather have a PIX501)
It's not like Cisco has all that great a reputation in the SMB market, either. Fine for enterprise, but people who know SMB know that Cisco is stupid for SMB on so many different levels, the least of which is cost/benefit being so incredibly high vs. pretty much everything else.
They are actually a bit like marbles, actually. They're so simple a 12 year old could figure them out, they're always falling down and rolling all over the place, and are kept in a sturdy collection bag. To effectively use them, some Jack comes along and tries to knock them out of the circle; wash, rinse and repeat.
While I agree with what you say, mostly, I've got contention with a couple key points.
Btrfs will be a great option when it is officially declared stable, but that hasn't happened yet.
On the contrary, btrfs will not be a good option 'when it's officially declared stable'. It'll be a good option when it's vetted as stable without too much regressive or destructive behavior, in the wild. Until then, it's still immature and best suited for closed environments.
The main advantages for btrfs will be for hosting virtual machines and VPSes, as Btrfs's excellent copy on write capabilities will facilitate rapid cloning of VMs.
This is already a reality in the world of FreeBSD, Solaris and the various Illumos/OpenSolaris clones, thanks to ZFS. ZFS is stable and reliable, and if you are on a platform that features it, you should avail yourself of it.
I agree, but a word of caution... FreeBSD lacks the necessary stable storage controller support to make ZFS fully stable on FreeBSD on all but a handful of configurations. Anyone who's used it for a while with any significant amount of data has probably witnessed a number of stability issues arrising.
I would advise you steer clear of ZFS on Linux.
Why? What's wrong with ZFS on Linux, aside from offering superior performance to FreeBSD ZFS on a better kernel than Solaris, with fewer craptastic application and support limitations than either?
I've currently got a machine with nearly 100 days uptime running Ubuntu, of all things, running ZoL without a hickup.
Mind you, this is running on very white box hardware, running 7 VMs currently, one of which is a network-wide backup target for rsync, another being the VM I'm typing this from. It's very disk active (for the 5 disks that're in it).
I've been using native ZoL now for over 2 years and, aside from some initial performance issues and dbus related problems, it's been pretty smooth sailing - flawless on multiple hosts for most of a year, now. I know of multiple large volume systems serving up data using ZoL publicly now, too.
ZoL is more ready than btrfs for mainstream use by a long shot, sadly, because btrfs had such a head start: it's more stable, less cryptic, more complete, generally faster, and with far fewer corner case issues.
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Why, are the British making them now?
It's easy to see Android's success and think Linux wasn't already taking things over by storm long before.
Sorry, but the reason Android is not only possible but exceedingly stable and featureful now, on pretty much any device that the manufacturer wants to support Android, is because of over a decade of progressively more mature hobbyist and then later commercial Linux support for embedded ARM systems.
What, you think all that hardware support and architecture specific corner case fixing just happened overnight? If you do, it's apparent you've not seen the competing platforms and how exceedingly limited and crippled they are regarding support.
We're talking about everything from Trolltech/Qtopia or Maemo to Debian ARM and esoteric distributions like Angstrom. Linux has been around this block a couple times.
Linux has been "crap" for well over a decade, in the sense that it has never made much headway against competing OSes in some key markets
"much headway in some key markets" is kind of insignificant to the big picture when you almost completely own the majority of others. Linux has been the name in town for what seems like the better part of a decade now for embedded, consumer, and web server systems - and now also virtualization for as long as VMWare has been around in any useable form (about 7 years?). Guess what? You don't have to dominate every single market to be a market player.
I don't know what kind of asinine point the GP was trying to make about Microsoft by bringing up Steve Jobs (the man had neither technical merit or a set of morals you could identify, if you could find them). But his point that OS X took the better part of a decade before it was anything but useless crap, from an OS /software engineering perspective? True, and still mostly true. It's also increasingly true in a useability perspective, sadly.
At least for me, it was never the 'common bricks' that made LEGOs awesome. Yes, they were necessary, but they weren't why you wanted a set, and weren't the "cool part" which allowed you to make certain kinds of vehicles, buildings, etc.
For instance, the 'space wheels'. Surely I wasn't the only person who fought with my siblings over the 'better' pieces?
(Those common bricks aren't all that common anymore, anyway.)
As the father of a budding 9 year old geek, let me just say: yeah, pretty much.
He loves LEGOS, and makes all kinds of things. The last thing he made was an RV - you know, the 41' pull behind 'camper' kind. He's also made the moon rover, and many other things I had to think "huh, I didn't know he had the right kind/enough parts to do that".
Yes, he has gone back and remade the castles etc. from the manual a couple times. Then he reconfigures them, rebuilds them, mixes them, and so on.
By the way, LEGO blocks are stupidly expensive. Has anyone looked at the pricing lately? A 'basic' set is going to run you over $100! I can't imagine (or believe) it used to be priced like that when I was a kid. I, for one, would not have had parents who could've or would've afforded them. (This is one of the reasons I am grateful he has graduated on to Minecraft!)
Regarding 'learning to forget the manual', knowing manual - or at least, the basic set of rules with which you're working - has its place. I recently took apart, and fixed a spendy multi-remote control (for household electronics). The manual itself wasn't of any use, but knowing how the shells on devices is usually fit together, where to look for screws, etc. was immensely useful - it saved a good half an hour of prying and the like which would've deformed the thing. The experiences gained by figuring out how these things piece together was indeed useful (though they don't put that in a manual - they should).
Minecraft is LEGO on crack, I'm finding. It's like LEGO meets an RTS meets an RPG meets a FPS. I refuse to play it the kids because I don't like what I'm sure I'd become.
As someone who administers AIX but am historically from the Linux side of things, I have seen quite a few oddities on this supposedly-stable OS of IBM's, AIX.
I have seen the kernel get clobbered by authentication systems and PAM, repeatedly. It doesn't handle OOM conditions nearly as well as Linux does (though you can tune it to a similar degree, if only because Linux borrowed a lot from their implementation). I've seen a great deal more erratic behavior (eg. daemons crashing, lack of responsiveness, etc.) on AIX when approaching OOM conditions (with or without swap - just whenever the slab space is almost all used) than I ever have on Linux.
If it were so stable, it wouldn't need patching primarily for stability as regularly as it does from IBM. Sorry, but from where I'm sitting, AIX has a lot more patches being released for a great deal more things than RHEL does, for very basic things. IMO, the biggest reason AIX is even used specifically is due to legacy, and institutional knowledge - AIX knowledge doesn't go as stale as quickly as Linux distro-specific knowledge does, because nothing ever changes - ever - on AIX, they just add more stuff.
And, of course, the hardware AIX runs on is pretty much just pure awesomeness. That's the biggest reason AIX should even be considered.
(Funny enough, the VIO and/or HMC on most "AIX" equipment appears to be some neutered and highly customized version of SuSE, so technically, AIX can only really be as stable as Linux is.)
Where are you finding these 'cheap flights'? A single flight that cost $100 for a round trip 12 years ago now costs over $1500.
How do you figure it's too cheap? Compared to what?
Asian airlines fly the same (or newer) planes. They've got all the same hard requirements for fuel, etc. Their flights are not as jam packed as the US flights are, but yet they still cost MUCH less. It's also less of a headache regarding security, scheduling, and pretty much everything else (even with a language barrier).
And yes, pre-9/11, airline security was (partially) done by the airlines. The FAA, popular culture ("appease them and they'll let you live"), and the US military were responsible for not acting reactively in the scenario. There was nothing the airlines could've done (aside from not enforcing the restriction of firearm laws) to prevent 9/11 because they simply didn't have the power.
It's not truthful to blame the airlines for 9/11 and say the gov't 'fixed' it. IT was, after all, the gov't that allowed the jihadists to come to the US in the first place...
Not only will gun owners keep killing each other, they'll continue to do so with guns. You think criminals care about more laws? :)
Also, if the population is unarmed, expect the creatures of opportunity - the criminals - to branch out and diversify their sources of income...
I've got to disagree with you here. The founding fathers didn't write, as far as I know, of "general self defense" as a reason for why the right to keep arms should be maintained. The right to self defense was, to them, so common sense that they didn't even conceive it to be written. They were primarily concerned about averting the cause of tyranny.
Keep in mind, these were people who came from a culture where dueling to the death over honor occurred, and warfare was fought basically as an orchestrated duel amongst large groups of men. They did think very differently than we do. :) (Remember, some of the founding fathers even wanted to institute Washington as the King of America.)
Their world was one of an all-powerful sovereign government (ie, "ordained by God"). England, the Crown, the Church, and the Will of God were synonymous. While I agree that self-defense was a prerequisite, it most certainly wasn't a conscious primary cause for the 2nd Amendment. It was keeping the contention of men who would rule over others at bay.
Serious analysis has always basically said (as I understand it) urban poverty preceeds crime". Said another way, crime increases as people cease being mutually reliant upon their neighbors. DC, for instance, is very impoverished, urban, and not mutually dependent. ND has never been not impoverished so there's nothing to proceed it, but it's also very rural and people need to be reliant upon their neighbors - everyone knows everyone's business.
What's interesting is that it's been suggested recently that the massive spikes in gun ownership and concealed carry laws being passed is that despite increased poverty in certain areas, national (violent) crime rates have actually dropped.
I don't know if you actually remember the first iPhone, but it was similarly horrid. Not only was the build quality very low, but it had no networking capabilities to speak of, and everything had to be sideloaded. It was a full two or more product iterations behind the Windows CE phones (and handsets) of the day with not even a fraction of the applications - basically, it fed off the success of the iPod, "an iPod with phone features".
How quickly we forget how things really were... it wasn't until Android came about that Apple started to get their act together, "hey, we might have some competition in the image department".
Nonsense, it doesn't matter if you're good at the "people" side of things if you're the person everyone is looking to to help them survive.
Short of being surrounded by like-minded people, you're going to have to rely on ordinaries. Ordinaries will need you, too.
There is only one way to avoid the long running blood fueds and eventually being wiped out. It's to build a new Empire of a single, cooperative and cohesive culture with its own internal enforcement structure. Think the Romans or the Khans.
That said, it's all moot once you die. Guns, ammo, MREs, etc. are short term (albeit single lifetime) thinking. Most people aren't going to think much beyond one or two generations.
Another way to look at this would be to consider the guns per gun related homicide numbers. In the US, there are approximated 89k guns per 100k people, giving a guns per gun-homicide ratio of 24k guns per gun-homicide. Serbia, the #2 country for guns per capita has approximately 58k guns per 100k people, giving them a guns per gun-homicide rate of 93k guns per gun-homicide.
So why not compare guns per gun homicide of the US vs. say, the UK? Or even use something much less culturally influenced, like comparing guns per gun homicide in a state like Florida or Texas (everyone everywhere has a gun or 12 and they have Thanksgiving Day shooting gettogethers) vs. a place like NY, DC, or IL (modern manufacture guns are all but banned)?
Minimal interest is what banks pay for simply allowing you to hold onto "your" money for you and use it for their interests.
It would be more than 'minimal interest', because it would be money used, under coercion, against their will, AGAINST their interests (sort of like taxes in many regards, really). So the interest rates on Payday loans seem more in keeping with the nature of the 'loan'.
Probably not just you. IOS is known for, what's the word... being consistently inconsistent? It works almost the same across a wide range of devices, except when it doesn't. Lots of little documented stuff. I've got a friend who's had to make calls in to 2nd and 1st level Cisco support before due to this happening; they're not even well versed on it within Cisco for the low end Enterprise stuff, just forget getting decent support on the SMB crap...
Yes, except Google has absolutely no reason to trust your cert more than one from a rooted box.
At least get one of the free certificates out there, with a valid certificate chain. That really is not that hard; in fact, it takes about 5 minutes if you've created a certificate before for anything.
What this move does is it eliminates all the rogue "I set up an SMTP server incidentally with my new slackware install" spam problems.
The impression I get is that most of the people getting W8 at this point are actually just IT departments at companies. Most people are avoiding W8 still if they're using computers at all - most people are seemingly switching to Android and even Apple tablets for 'primary computing', because they meet their needs.
I imagine the people who bought into Windows ME got pretty used to working around its egocentricity, too. Yes, I meant egocentricity.
Like with WinME, I suspect the statistics are somewhat skewed to show people 'adapting'. It's either that or die, right? And when you're the only three people left in the world who haven't put Windows 7 on the device, you kind of have a reputation to uphold for being the statistical outliers who adapt to what they're given than adapt their world to their existence. (Here's guessing they also own Macs.)
Joking aside, if this is all truthful and on the level, and isn't just a symptom of people backgrading to W7 or some such thing, this will mark yet another "modern operating system" I've been able to completely avoid. I haven't touched OS X for the better part of 5 years now; I have never touched an iPhone except briefly, and I'm a complete incompetent while using one (they're not all that intuitive, apparently). Maybe I'm doomed to be irrelevant in a couple years, but I somehow doubt it - I've familiarized with three new operating systems (to me) in the past year and demand for my skills is in no short supply.
When vendors continually marginalize the the talents of the people who work on their products instead of reinforcing them, they alienate themselves first and foremost. IBM knows this, and most of its products, as a result, never lose functionality (only gaining it, despite the frequent need for that functionality to be eliminated). The result is a bit of a mess, but it creates a mess which people can spend an entire career maintaining and fixing - not just the 'best and the brightest' or whatever, but normal people as well.
You'd think that Microsoft would've learned that, given that they've been the "starter OS" for technical people in recent years. While I understand MS wants to eliminate the need for technical people outright, it's not likely to ever* happen. It's just going to alienate MS.
* At least soon.
On the other hand, the standardization would also limit designs and prevent some cutting edge innovations from being utilized.
No, I strongly disagree with this sentiment.
Standardization sets the baseline. Take HTML for instance. What if there was no openly accepted standard in the early days? It'd have taken a lot longer for things to take off; the improvements, variations, and deviations (MS HTML, VRML, HTML 4.0, etc.) would not have occurred. Everyone would've been attempting to (more or less) completely one-up the other person (see: Flash) and nobody would benefit until a monopoly were established, forcing everyone else out.
In the case of hardware: if you have a standard, then anyone can create components for it. Without the standard, it is essentially locked down. "We have a sound mixing device compatible with the board", "we have a video processor card compatible with the board", "we have an extended run battery pack for the board", and so on. If I recall correctly, having a simple hardware interface standard was what made Nintendo so wildly popular with the NES, back in the day (regarding things like controllers and other misc. input). While everyone else did crazy things to retain control and make it complicated, Nintendo made it a simple serial interface.
As someone who has attempted doing just this (albeit almost 7 years ago, now), let me just say: I want one. My ultimate goal was a 'laptop' which could be both always on and have a day or more worth of connectivity (massive battery). The biggest problem I ran into was trying to figure out how to make the case and how to interface a board with a monitor of suitable/proper size. Thankfully, options for monitors looks a little more mature nowadays with the prevalence of tablets, and ARM hardware has improved markedly as well while dropping in price.
The case is really what held me up. I had no idea how to get something useable with the materials I had. Fortunately, we have something now available to us which was not available then: printable 3D objects. If someone were to design a laptop chassis CAD file around one or two commonly available components (an inexpensive/common LCD panel, and the Lenovo UltraNav keyboard) we would be well on our way to something useable, I think. Make it 'shim layered' in design, so you print the whole thing out, reinforce it with metal (possibly thin metal rods/tubing in key structural tension points, like around the display bevel and longitudinally across the base
As for the board, I think SATA is mostly extraneous at this point for most laptops. miniPCIe is going to suit most needs for storage in a mobile device where USB and SD do not. The idea of having a rotating platter in a laptop is really quite extraneous and risky these days.
It's immensely useful, actually. It saves a lot of money on storage, particularly when it's quasi-archival storage (ie an archive which is accessed frequently, such as most of the data most people have for personal use). It's just not been historically all that cost effective (from a computing resource viewpoint) to implement and not all that stable, making even the inefficient "script and file based dedup" seem appealing.
No, that was never such a problem. Who cares about the badging? The problem was that Cisco tried to make Linksys products - which competed on price value first and foremost - into Cisco products - which compete on threat of failure and job security. Huge difference!
The problems were:
* they abandoned the home market through marketing and getting rid of all the products which appealed to home users
* they increased the prices of the Linksys products - because, well, they're badged Cisco SMB now.
* they didn't improve the Linksys products, they made most of them worse (the latest SMB routers are completely useless; I'd rather have a PIX501)
It's not like Cisco has all that great a reputation in the SMB market, either. Fine for enterprise, but people who know SMB know that Cisco is stupid for SMB on so many different levels, the least of which is cost/benefit being so incredibly high vs. pretty much everything else.
And by proxy, Android has ZFS, too. I had a pool on my SD card for a while. It worked. :) Though performance wasn't that great (using the ZoL port).
1. passive dedup could be done in userland using a script. big deal..
Um, if this is even remotely possible in your mind, you don't understand dedup. That, and you probably don't understand the word "passive", either.
This is an extremely costly solution, both in time and resource utilization.
They are actually a bit like marbles, actually. They're so simple a 12 year old could figure them out, they're always falling down and rolling all over the place, and are kept in a sturdy collection bag. To effectively use them, some Jack comes along and tries to knock them out of the circle; wash, rinse and repeat.
While I agree with what you say, mostly, I've got contention with a couple key points.
Btrfs will be a great option when it is officially declared stable, but that hasn't happened yet.
On the contrary, btrfs will not be a good option 'when it's officially declared stable'. It'll be a good option when it's vetted as stable without too much regressive or destructive behavior, in the wild. Until then, it's still immature and best suited for closed environments.
The main advantages for btrfs will be for hosting virtual machines and VPSes, as Btrfs's excellent copy on write capabilities will facilitate rapid cloning of VMs.
This is already a reality in the world of FreeBSD, Solaris and the various Illumos/OpenSolaris clones, thanks to ZFS. ZFS is stable and reliable, and if you are on a platform that features it, you should avail yourself of it.
I agree, but a word of caution... FreeBSD lacks the necessary stable storage controller support to make ZFS fully stable on FreeBSD on all but a handful of configurations. Anyone who's used it for a while with any significant amount of data has probably witnessed a number of stability issues arrising.
I would advise you steer clear of ZFS on Linux.
Why? What's wrong with ZFS on Linux, aside from offering superior performance to FreeBSD ZFS on a better kernel than Solaris, with fewer craptastic application and support limitations than either?
I've currently got a machine with nearly 100 days uptime running Ubuntu, of all things, running ZoL without a hickup.
Mind you, this is running on very white box hardware, running 7 VMs currently, one of which is a network-wide backup target for rsync, another being the VM I'm typing this from. It's very disk active (for the 5 disks that're in it).
I've been using native ZoL now for over 2 years and, aside from some initial performance issues and dbus related problems, it's been pretty smooth sailing - flawless on multiple hosts for most of a year, now. I know of multiple large volume systems serving up data using ZoL publicly now, too.
ZoL is more ready than btrfs for mainstream use by a long shot, sadly, because btrfs had such a head start: it's more stable, less cryptic, more complete, generally faster, and with far fewer corner case issues.