Did I miss something? Since when is Skype open source? It works on a lot of platforms, sure (and this is admirable, even if somewhat ineffectual due to how crappy their clients have been for non-mainstream OSes) - but it is certainly not open source.
Most people have something illegal to hide. Almost without variation, you're guaranteed to do something illegal once a week, even without knowing it. A couple examples:
* A piece of trash falls from your vehicle. * Your dog gets lose and destroy's someone else's property. * An emissions-related component on your vehicle fails. * You sell a personal item (eg. at a yard sale) and do not report the proceeds to the IRS. * You walk across the street or perform a U-turn where there is an obscured sign prohibiting it. * You do not fully stop at a red light/stop sign. * A friend sends you an audio file or you borrow a burned movie. * You wait for more than 12 hours to shovel your walkway after a storm. * You don't cut your lawn every week. * You miss the posting for the speed limit decrease and go 10+ mph through a school zone.
These will get you in a varying degree of trouble if you get caught (and the prosecuting party actually cares). However, one thing holds true: if you get caught and ticketed/prosecuted, it can cost you hundreds of dollars. If you avoid the repercussions/can't pay up, it can cost you thousands, jail time, and quite likely the ability to be employed again, ever.
1) The certification meant something 2) The certificate holder was competent 3) The certificate holder has the actual chops, beyond the certificate
You will still have problems if you do not give them the time and resources to get the job they need to get done. Too many places do the equivalent of handing an engineer a shovel, saying "build me a bridge". Or, sadly, handing their draftsman a pile of sticks and some baling twine and saying same.
Size isn't everything in a display. Most of these newer displays are tinnnnny on the vertical resolution. That's as big a thing to me as overall size, personally.
I'm getting really tired of this. In the past 11 years, I have used all of the major browsers exclusively/predominantly for some period of time - IE7, Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chromium/Chrome. Why? Because:
* The 'mainstay' refuses/fails to innovate. * The 'mainstay' gets slow and ineffectual feature creep resulting in horrendous bloat. * The 'mainstay' ops for features over performance improvements (which helped drive me to their browser in the first place).
Does Google really think they've got such a stranglehold on the browser market that they can just remove such an integral part of the browser? When I'm browsing, it's often that I don't even use the mouse - I can navigate just as quickly/quicker within most sites with the 'autofocus' and keyboard browser shortcuts.
Google did a pretty good thing, IMO, in removing a couple of the browser 'artifacts'. Tabs, and address bar - those are really all you need. Anything else really is obstructive (especially on these newer vertically-limited screens). Same for the title bar, for all intents and purposes (you still have the taskbar and tag's label, which is usually good enough). But, doing away without the address bar? I use the URL in the address bar to tell where I am, as well as hotkey (ctl-L) to it frequently. It's a quasi-search (it's rare that i type in a 'new' URL anymore, just use the autocomplete from history).
I know that when I'm in 'fullscreen' mode, it starts to feel a bit confining and claustrophobic. I think they might be able to 'make it work' (sorta like the 'find' dialog pops up in a small area on the top right and then disappears - a behavior I'm not too fond of, personally). Hopefully they don't "reduce to nothing".
Meanwhile, the performance issues (caching) they borrowed from Firefox, which can make Chrome irritating at best and slooooow to load a page at worst, have been around forever. Why don't they fix those? It'll certainly make performance better on a slow CPU, slow disk machine (say, a smartphone or netbook).
Eh, she could certainly pull off 17, I think. She still has a very young, pert/fresh face. She's not exactly buxom now, and I'm sure she's probably at least reasonably in shape (SCC recently shows that to be true) - she looks little different (though actually a bit more attractive to my eye).
The only thing stopping them at this point is their ability to get the full staff on board for a second season, and possibly a couple decent writers to make it akin to the spirit of the original. There's still a lot of story to be told there, and disenfranchising the movie would not be an unheard of (or unacceptable to fans) decision.
(And, of course, actual rights to production/the IP. Seems they've only gotten publishing rights?)
Eh, I'll second this, though I will say that Sci Fi (er, SyFy), being second rate, still manages to put out a fairly large amount of decent original content on their own (or airs it when it dies somewhere else). Also, they're one of the highest watched cable channels out there, for all age groups (very even demographics). They're about as close as you can get to generally acceptable family fare anymore. (I'm not saying most of their internally produced stuff is -good-, mind you, but for evening fare with the family, it's almost the only thing on that everyone can accept.)
I'm not sure what significance this has on SyFy buying the rights, though. Most of the actors were already "SyFy" actors - I've seen most of them in at least a handful of times in Stargate and Stargate Atlantis, for instance. So it sort of belongs in the family, as it were.
As for Firefly, Firefly may have done well on Fox, had they not aired the episodes out of order. Who the hell thought to do that? The order or the episodes was fairly important for plot development. I'm sure there are many people, such as myself, who hates missing an episode of a show (even going to the lengths of not watching the show if there are significant holes).
IMO, it's wise - given their demographics - for SyFy to buy the rights. The franchise is by no means dead, even though it's 9 years out of production. Even if it wouldn't be the same with a different cast of characters (and there's no saying the story couldn't be continued with many of the same actors, even), it'd still be better entertainment than most of what's on TV. Firefly, all 14 original episodes, are still a favorite evening fare in our household (up there with Stargate).
That's why fiat currency is so great. It's exactly as rare as we decide it should be.
You mean the government can do so; it's called currency/market manipulation, and it tends to not work out so well for the little people.
It can be made easy to identify and hard to forge.
Money is historically very, very easy to forge. Gold, on the other hand, can't be in a fashion that some simple tests can verify.
It's not exactly inert, but in a paper currency, that's a benefit, as the supply can be reduced through attrition.
How is that a benefit? It then takes value out of the economy (again) to print more. You've absolutely no way to get a positive ledger simply through the operation of the system, without stealing/pulling from someone else's ledger.
If you view "currency" as something to trade for goods, fiat currency is bad. IF you view it as a tool for manipulating markets, fiat is great.
The only problem comes in when people can't agree how rare the currency should be. Some people think we have too much, some think there's too little, others think there should be no choice in the matter and it should be set based on a pile of gold bars stashed away being unhelpful to anyone.
And this is pretty much the exact reason we (and other countries) are having economic issues right now. Governments have been manipulating the economy through fiat currencies for the better part of the past 100 years, and it's starting to hurt due to how accurately it represents reality.
And who said gold bars stashed away was the way to do it? Gold itself, as currency, seems to make sense to me. If you need a smaller denomination, break it up or encapsulate it in stamped epoxy, or something. Prices and denominations could be in fractions of an ounce (or whatever metric you want to use).
A mind-controlled wheelchair? How about one like what Hawking uses (mini-joystick)? They make wheelchair accessible vans which are well suited for this role.
I have one of these. It uses my hands to turn the steering wheel, which turns the joints which actuate the pump which transfers steering momentum to the wheels. As an additional bonus, it uses my feet almost completely independently to operate the pedal which pulls the cable which adjusts the throttle (and alternatively, the brakes).
I suppose it may have been OK if you were into that kind of comic book.
Personally, there are few movies I dislike (short of the boiler plate romance stuff). If it's remotely unique, I'll at least enjoy the experience.
Watchmen? I didn't enjoy it. I sat there for over 2 hours waiting for it to get enjoyable. Hell, porn is more enjoyable entertainment: the most enjoyable part of the film was the in-air 'love scene', and there wasn't much of that.
Where to begin?
* The characters were overdone, yet had precious little actual development. Why do I care? What makes them interesting? Most of them had dull personalities. * Short on actual plot development. "It's like The Incredibles, but took 3 times as long to make said point known" * There were too many characters. Sure, there were 2 hours to develop them, but their distinction, importance, etc. was not significant enough to draw an emotional link to them. * It was slow. I'm not sure how, exactly, but it was one of the slowest moving films I've ever seen. * Jackie Earle Haley was the film's best actor. He's not bad, and I enjoy most of his roles, but seriously: the acting in the film was bad overall. * I wouldn't say it was outrageously violent or even overly violent. What I would say is that, lacking anything else to draw a person's attention, it was pretty senselessly violent. Violence, as the focus, makes for shit films.
Watchmen is a lot like the LotR films, I think: you need some sort of connection to the story already, unless something else is there to make it worthwhile.
What distinguishes LotR from Watchmen, and made it a success?
* Memorable characters (as in, for a first-time watcher who can get invested in them) * Clearly defined character roles. You feel "on the in" because you know what's going on. The wizard is helping the hobbit, the hobbit is on a quest, and he has supporters... done. * Awesome 30-minute action scenes. * Good actors with even better characters. * Good dialog that keeps the viewer engaged.
Even if they were the same movie, you could compare Watchmen and LotR to Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2. The first was plastic, dull, and somewhat awkward feeling. The second - same damn movie - was much better done, with more attention to detail, better acting, and so on.
That's why Watchmen sucked, unless you already knew the story.
you, and your parent, need to do a little research.
An atom CPU is a bit more than just those 330 whatevers you can still find. There are literally dozens of variants of the "Atom" chips now.
There is indeed an Atom SoC that clocks in under 4 watts for TDP. This says nothing about idle states, which are drastically improved.
Now consider the fact that the LCD on a phone takes probably in the range of 15 watts, maybe a bit more. Then you've got the radio, which is going to reduce your battery life all the further and is comparable to the display (maybe 2/3 the TDP). Wifi? Tack it on again.
No, the CPU is not the major component in power sucking. It's negligible compared to the other components, particularly with modern designs. The latest Atom SoCs are almost as efficient as the Snapdragon and other 'latest generation' mobile phone CPUs. The Tegra 2 is interesting, but it's hardly a game breaker: it's still "just an ARM CPU". Since it doesn't appear to offer radio capabilities it offers nothing over the snapdragon or other ARM cell phone processors - it's bet is in consoles or handheld game systems. Now, an x86 cell phone, on the other hand... that has a bit more interesting potential.
Methinks people who propose this do not understand the concept of networking, and how such 'nodes' need upstream nodes else the network becomes utterly and irreversibly saturated.
Either that, or they're simply greedy: like the people who latched onto revolutionary figures like Marx and Che to push their own agenda to selfish deeds (not that Marx and Che were exactly what you'd call humanitarians), these people are pushing utopic bullshit for their own financial/social gain.
Are you kidding, or do you have something to back that up? It's as plausible as anything, I suppose, but I'm interested in hearing reasoning if indeed this is true.
Incorrect. The latest atoms (granted, not readily available for consumption) are fast and lower power than some of the leading ARM smartphone CPU/SoCs (or at least comparable on a perf/watt basis).
Your biggest power drains in a smartphone will be:
* Cellular and WiFi radios * Display * Crap software - poorly implemented drivers for the above, in addition to poorly implemented 3D/etc. drawing mechanisms which ineffectively utilize the processor, draw a lot on the screen, and so on.
Real sysadmins also restart a service after making configuration changes. If I had a nickel for every time I've come across a long-running machine with a mis-configured service which wasn't reflected in the in-memory running service, I'd be rich.
Yeah, seriously. This article reads like a feature list for an old model vehicle you should put out to pasture, to boot:
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 1: We don't use sudo
Well why the hell not? You realize that it can significantly increase security and auditing by doing so, right?
If you're a one-man show, then shame on you for (likely) having a weak root password.
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 2: We use vi, not emacs, and definitely not pico or nano
And what's wrong with emacs? vi/vim regex are backwards.
Don't get me wrong - I use vi, and have for over a decade. But emacs is a bit more powerful and doesn't have as awkward a command set. For anything vim can do, something else can do it better simply because figuring out the arcania for vi is a bit difficult at times.
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 3: We wield regular expressions like weapons
Yes, yes they do. And they don't use a single goddamn comment, because "this stuff is easy".
Regex are awesome. I use them daily, but come back a week later? I'll have to figure them out again if there's a problem. A one-line (10+ character) regex should have multiple lines of comments. Just because it's only a couple lines and performs a lot does not mean you don't have to document it.
Yes, yes they are. They're lazy to the point of incompetence: they don't document their work, and don't play well with others as a result.
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 5: We prefer elegant solutions
This goes back to the 'lazy' part.
Something isn't an elegant solution if it needs maintenance, pruning, etc. - who cares if you bashed out a crude perl script in a couple minutes for a single function and put it into production? Was it commented? Is it robust? Is it mentioned in system documentation? No? Then it's not a solution, it's a crude hack.
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 6: We generally assume the problem is with whomever is asking the question
This would actually be correct: the person asking the question should know better than to ask a self-centered, misanthropic, paranoid, backwards unix codger anything, because they're not going to a) get a complete answer or b) get a useful answer.
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 7: We have more in common with medical examiners than doctors
This is often/normally true, but it's true for those who have similar level of experience/skill yet adhere to good system administration practices as well. (WHy not hire them instead?)
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 8: We know more about Windows than we'll ever let on
Yes - except for the type of veteran unix admin who meets the first page of traits. They're myopic and think their precious systems are the end-all, be-all.
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 9: Rebooting is almost never an option
Correct. Forget those pesky kernel or base system upgrades for security, or routine reboots for maintenance, which are all considered generally good practices. We'll just leave the systems running until it's time to replace them, or let the next guy deal with a completely undocumented system that hasn't been rebooted in years. Surely, nothing bad will happen, and the employer is wise to keep such people in their employ. (This is where the 'forensic' abilities that good admins have come into play.)
If some of these traits seem antisocial or difficult to understand from a lay perspective, that's because they are. Where others may see intractable, overly difficult methods, we see enlightenment, born of years of learning, experience, and most of all, logic.
Most of these are difficult to understand from a 'business continuity' or 'connected to the Internet' perspective. What i
Unless you're using the (mostly shit) iSCSI software initiators, you'll be using iSCSI hardware initiators on 10gbit Ethernet - which is hardly cheap.
Do the math: to get > 1Gbit/s on your fabric-side links, you need to spend a copious amount if you're going 10gigE. Not only are the switches ungodly expensive compared to 1Gbit, but they're expensive compared to pretty much everything else - Infiniband or Fibrechannel. When it comes down to it, the biggest thing 10gig Ethernet has going for it is compatibility and people understanding Ethernet (it certainly isn't price or availability - it's easier to find high throughput FC and the like).
FC is great - for storage networks. Infiniband is likewise great, though it was way ahead of the curve (and I have no idea what's keeping it from competing now, aside from vendors not wanting to push it). They're comparable on price and similar on functionality. Ethernet keeps getting its push from 35 years of history.
Why anyone would want to encapsulate FC on top of Ethernet (thereby reducing any advantage FC might have), I have no idea. It sounds like one of those "let's fix our poor engineering with creative application of technology; it can bite the next poor fucker in the ass".
A big part of this is 'compliance testing'. It's hard (and expensive) to get a product approved for this-or-that "mission critical", regulated use.
Not only that, but you can guarantee the cogs of local government would make all-Linux (or whatever) locked-down workstations a no-go. Users would bitch, and that'd be the end of that: facebook would be available, "application" would be available, and so on - and it'd be all over. It doesn't matter which OS it's running on if there is no administration.
By "decent AV" do you mean "AV which management will approve and is made by Symantec or McAfee" or "AV which doesn't fit the previous description"? Because the former may have even caused this, directly.
The hardware their mission-critical, lives-depend-on-seconds their 'server' ran on? It was probably something like a standalone server without redundant power supplies or disks. The system may have had redundant disks through software RAID. Odds are strong against the system having ECC RAM, or the hardware being on a maintenance plan. Odds are strong for the organization paying 5-10x as much for the 'certified' hardware than it cost the shitty vendor to build from their parts bin. In all likelihood, the system required a proprietary part or was designed in a fashion which would inhibit from working (at all) without a specific piece of hardware - which cost $10 at the time, but was only available from a single vendor, which has since gone out of business.
If I had a small sum of money for every variance of this I've seen, I'd be rich. It seems pretty much run of the mill in government and healthcare (ie anywhere that 'profit'/budget isn't a significant concern - "we'll just raise prices/taxes") for vendors to abuse some 'compliance' requirement, overlooking simple best practices for software and hardware. "We're SAS compliant! We're HIPAA compliant!" Yeah, well your product is still shit.
I've got a Linksys wrt54G 1.1. It's 'old' hardware at this point.
I put dd-wrt on it almost immediately after getting it (first thing I did). About a year later, I went to tomato firmware, and then recently (around Xmas?) I went back to dd-wrt to see if i could get the VLAN tagging to work (I didn't, ended up getting a real managed switch). I just went back to tomato.
I didn't have to enter a single configuration change. The ROM settings were all preserved across the updates/changes.
For the performance gain you see by going to dd-wrt, I've seen the same leap by going from dd-wrt to the tomato firmware. (The features in dd-wrt out pace the weak hardware in the devices, anyway).
For a basic home wireless router, the hardware is pretty great. Don't ask it for much more, though.:)
Considering what else is out there, I don't think I'll be buying any more Linksys products. The cost/benefit doesn't pan out. Nearly identical equipment is available for half as much, and better is available for less.
Slashdot Mirror
You could do that, only if you could past muster for the zoning permit on your lolz.
Of course, then we're back to the paperwork, and the EPA is going to throw a bitch about that.
You may as well just stay home and watch American Idol.
Skype isn't fully open source
Did I miss something? Since when is Skype open source? It works on a lot of platforms, sure (and this is admirable, even if somewhat ineffectual due to how crappy their clients have been for non-mainstream OSes) - but it is certainly not open source.
Most people have something illegal to hide. Almost without variation, you're guaranteed to do something illegal once a week, even without knowing it. A couple examples:
* A piece of trash falls from your vehicle.
* Your dog gets lose and destroy's someone else's property.
* An emissions-related component on your vehicle fails.
* You sell a personal item (eg. at a yard sale) and do not report the proceeds to the IRS.
* You walk across the street or perform a U-turn where there is an obscured sign prohibiting it.
* You do not fully stop at a red light/stop sign.
* A friend sends you an audio file or you borrow a burned movie.
* You wait for more than 12 hours to shovel your walkway after a storm.
* You don't cut your lawn every week.
* You miss the posting for the speed limit decrease and go 10+ mph through a school zone.
These will get you in a varying degree of trouble if you get caught (and the prosecuting party actually cares). However, one thing holds true: if you get caught and ticketed/prosecuted, it can cost you hundreds of dollars. If you avoid the repercussions/can't pay up, it can cost you thousands, jail time, and quite likely the ability to be employed again, ever.
And even if:
1) The certification meant something
2) The certificate holder was competent
3) The certificate holder has the actual chops, beyond the certificate
You will still have problems if you do not give them the time and resources to get the job they need to get done. Too many places do the equivalent of handing an engineer a shovel, saying "build me a bridge". Or, sadly, handing their draftsman a pile of sticks and some baling twine and saying same.
Size isn't everything in a display. Most of these newer displays are tinnnnny on the vertical resolution. That's as big a thing to me as overall size, personally.
I'm getting really tired of this. In the past 11 years, I have used all of the major browsers exclusively/predominantly for some period of time - IE7, Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chromium/Chrome. Why? Because:
* The 'mainstay' refuses/fails to innovate.
* The 'mainstay' gets slow and ineffectual feature creep resulting in horrendous bloat.
* The 'mainstay' ops for features over performance improvements (which helped drive me to their browser in the first place).
Does Google really think they've got such a stranglehold on the browser market that they can just remove such an integral part of the browser? When I'm browsing, it's often that I don't even use the mouse - I can navigate just as quickly/quicker within most sites with the 'autofocus' and keyboard browser shortcuts.
Google did a pretty good thing, IMO, in removing a couple of the browser 'artifacts'. Tabs, and address bar - those are really all you need. Anything else really is obstructive (especially on these newer vertically-limited screens). Same for the title bar, for all intents and purposes (you still have the taskbar and tag's label, which is usually good enough). But, doing away without the address bar? I use the URL in the address bar to tell where I am, as well as hotkey (ctl-L) to it frequently. It's a quasi-search (it's rare that i type in a 'new' URL anymore, just use the autocomplete from history).
I know that when I'm in 'fullscreen' mode, it starts to feel a bit confining and claustrophobic. I think they might be able to 'make it work' (sorta like the 'find' dialog pops up in a small area on the top right and then disappears - a behavior I'm not too fond of, personally). Hopefully they don't "reduce to nothing".
Meanwhile, the performance issues (caching) they borrowed from Firefox, which can make Chrome irritating at best and slooooow to load a page at worst, have been around forever. Why don't they fix those? It'll certainly make performance better on a slow CPU, slow disk machine (say, a smartphone or netbook).
Eh, she could certainly pull off 17, I think. She still has a very young, pert/fresh face. She's not exactly buxom now, and I'm sure she's probably at least reasonably in shape (SCC recently shows that to be true) - she looks little different (though actually a bit more attractive to my eye).
The only thing stopping them at this point is their ability to get the full staff on board for a second season, and possibly a couple decent writers to make it akin to the spirit of the original. There's still a lot of story to be told there, and disenfranchising the movie would not be an unheard of (or unacceptable to fans) decision.
(And, of course, actual rights to production/the IP. Seems they've only gotten publishing rights?)
Eh, I'll second this, though I will say that Sci Fi (er, SyFy), being second rate, still manages to put out a fairly large amount of decent original content on their own (or airs it when it dies somewhere else). Also, they're one of the highest watched cable channels out there, for all age groups (very even demographics). They're about as close as you can get to generally acceptable family fare anymore. (I'm not saying most of their internally produced stuff is -good-, mind you, but for evening fare with the family, it's almost the only thing on that everyone can accept.)
I'm not sure what significance this has on SyFy buying the rights, though. Most of the actors were already "SyFy" actors - I've seen most of them in at least a handful of times in Stargate and Stargate Atlantis, for instance. So it sort of belongs in the family, as it were.
As for Firefly, Firefly may have done well on Fox, had they not aired the episodes out of order. Who the hell thought to do that? The order or the episodes was fairly important for plot development. I'm sure there are many people, such as myself, who hates missing an episode of a show (even going to the lengths of not watching the show if there are significant holes).
IMO, it's wise - given their demographics - for SyFy to buy the rights. The franchise is by no means dead, even though it's 9 years out of production. Even if it wouldn't be the same with a different cast of characters (and there's no saying the story couldn't be continued with many of the same actors, even), it'd still be better entertainment than most of what's on TV. Firefly, all 14 original episodes, are still a favorite evening fare in our household (up there with Stargate).
That's why fiat currency is so great. It's exactly as rare as we decide it should be.
You mean the government can do so; it's called currency/market manipulation, and it tends to not work out so well for the little people.
It can be made easy to identify and hard to forge.
Money is historically very, very easy to forge. Gold, on the other hand, can't be in a fashion that some simple tests can verify.
It's not exactly inert, but in a paper currency, that's a benefit, as the supply can be reduced through attrition.
How is that a benefit? It then takes value out of the economy (again) to print more. You've absolutely no way to get a positive ledger simply through the operation of the system, without stealing/pulling from someone else's ledger.
If you view "currency" as something to trade for goods, fiat currency is bad. IF you view it as a tool for manipulating markets, fiat is great.
The only problem comes in when people can't agree how rare the currency should be. Some people think we have too much, some think there's too little, others think there should be no choice in the matter and it should be set based on a pile of gold bars stashed away being unhelpful to anyone.
And this is pretty much the exact reason we (and other countries) are having economic issues right now. Governments have been manipulating the economy through fiat currencies for the better part of the past 100 years, and it's starting to hurt due to how accurately it represents reality.
And who said gold bars stashed away was the way to do it? Gold itself, as currency, seems to make sense to me. If you need a smaller denomination, break it up or encapsulate it in stamped epoxy, or something. Prices and denominations could be in fractions of an ounce (or whatever metric you want to use).
A mind-controlled wheelchair? How about one like what Hawking uses (mini-joystick)? They make wheelchair accessible vans which are well suited for this role.
I have one of these. It uses my hands to turn the steering wheel, which turns the joints which actuate the pump which transfers steering momentum to the wheels. As an additional bonus, it uses my feet almost completely independently to operate the pedal which pulls the cable which adjusts the throttle (and alternatively, the brakes).
I suppose it may have been OK if you were into that kind of comic book.
Personally, there are few movies I dislike (short of the boiler plate romance stuff). If it's remotely unique, I'll at least enjoy the experience.
Watchmen? I didn't enjoy it. I sat there for over 2 hours waiting for it to get enjoyable. Hell, porn is more enjoyable entertainment: the most enjoyable part of the film was the in-air 'love scene', and there wasn't much of that.
Where to begin?
* The characters were overdone, yet had precious little actual development. Why do I care? What makes them interesting? Most of them had dull personalities.
* Short on actual plot development. "It's like The Incredibles, but took 3 times as long to make said point known"
* There were too many characters. Sure, there were 2 hours to develop them, but their distinction, importance, etc. was not significant enough to draw an emotional link to them.
* It was slow. I'm not sure how, exactly, but it was one of the slowest moving films I've ever seen.
* Jackie Earle Haley was the film's best actor. He's not bad, and I enjoy most of his roles, but seriously: the acting in the film was bad overall.
* I wouldn't say it was outrageously violent or even overly violent. What I would say is that, lacking anything else to draw a person's attention, it was pretty senselessly violent. Violence, as the focus, makes for shit films.
Watchmen is a lot like the LotR films, I think: you need some sort of connection to the story already, unless something else is there to make it worthwhile.
What distinguishes LotR from Watchmen, and made it a success?
* Memorable characters (as in, for a first-time watcher who can get invested in them)
* Clearly defined character roles. You feel "on the in" because you know what's going on. The wizard is helping the hobbit, the hobbit is on a quest, and he has supporters... done.
* Awesome 30-minute action scenes.
* Good actors with even better characters.
* Good dialog that keeps the viewer engaged.
Even if they were the same movie, you could compare Watchmen and LotR to Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2. The first was plastic, dull, and somewhat awkward feeling. The second - same damn movie - was much better done, with more attention to detail, better acting, and so on.
That's why Watchmen sucked, unless you already knew the story.
You are right. A couple gigabytes of downloads and webpages a day, and I hardly even have to eat, pay rent, or do other things in life.
you, and your parent, need to do a little research.
An atom CPU is a bit more than just those 330 whatevers you can still find. There are literally dozens of variants of the "Atom" chips now.
There is indeed an Atom SoC that clocks in under 4 watts for TDP. This says nothing about idle states, which are drastically improved.
Now consider the fact that the LCD on a phone takes probably in the range of 15 watts, maybe a bit more. Then you've got the radio, which is going to reduce your battery life all the further and is comparable to the display (maybe 2/3 the TDP). Wifi? Tack it on again.
No, the CPU is not the major component in power sucking. It's negligible compared to the other components, particularly with modern designs. The latest Atom SoCs are almost as efficient as the Snapdragon and other 'latest generation' mobile phone CPUs. The Tegra 2 is interesting, but it's hardly a game breaker: it's still "just an ARM CPU". Since it doesn't appear to offer radio capabilities it offers nothing over the snapdragon or other ARM cell phone processors - it's bet is in consoles or handheld game systems. Now, an x86 cell phone, on the other hand... that has a bit more interesting potential.
Methinks people who propose this do not understand the concept of networking, and how such 'nodes' need upstream nodes else the network becomes utterly and irreversibly saturated.
Either that, or they're simply greedy: like the people who latched onto revolutionary figures like Marx and Che to push their own agenda to selfish deeds (not that Marx and Che were exactly what you'd call humanitarians), these people are pushing utopic bullshit for their own financial/social gain.
Are you kidding, or do you have something to back that up? It's as plausible as anything, I suppose, but I'm interested in hearing reasoning if indeed this is true.
Incorrect. The latest atoms (granted, not readily available for consumption) are fast and lower power than some of the leading ARM smartphone CPU/SoCs (or at least comparable on a perf/watt basis).
Your biggest power drains in a smartphone will be:
* Cellular and WiFi radios
* Display
* Crap software - poorly implemented drivers for the above, in addition to poorly implemented 3D/etc. drawing mechanisms which ineffectively utilize the processor, draw a lot on the screen, and so on.
Real sysadmins also restart a service after making configuration changes. If I had a nickel for every time I've come across a long-running machine with a mis-configured service which wasn't reflected in the in-memory running service, I'd be rich.
Yeah, seriously. This article reads like a feature list for an old model vehicle you should put out to pasture, to boot:
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 1: We don't use sudo
Well why the hell not? You realize that it can significantly increase security and auditing by doing so, right?
If you're a one-man show, then shame on you for (likely) having a weak root password.
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 2: We use vi, not emacs, and definitely not pico or nano
And what's wrong with emacs? vi/vim regex are backwards.
Don't get me wrong - I use vi, and have for over a decade. But emacs is a bit more powerful and doesn't have as awkward a command set. For anything vim can do, something else can do it better simply because figuring out the arcania for vi is a bit difficult at times.
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 3: We wield regular expressions like weapons
Yes, yes they do. And they don't use a single goddamn comment, because "this stuff is easy".
Regex are awesome. I use them daily, but come back a week later? I'll have to figure them out again if there's a problem. A one-line (10+ character) regex should have multiple lines of comments. Just because it's only a couple lines and performs a lot does not mean you don't have to document it.
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 4: We're inherently lazy
Yes, yes they are. They're lazy to the point of incompetence: they don't document their work, and don't play well with others as a result.
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 5: We prefer elegant solutions
This goes back to the 'lazy' part.
Something isn't an elegant solution if it needs maintenance, pruning, etc. - who cares if you bashed out a crude perl script in a couple minutes for a single function and put it into production? Was it commented? Is it robust? Is it mentioned in system documentation? No? Then it's not a solution, it's a crude hack.
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 6: We generally assume the problem is with whomever is asking the question
This would actually be correct: the person asking the question should know better than to ask a self-centered, misanthropic, paranoid, backwards unix codger anything, because they're not going to a) get a complete answer or b) get a useful answer.
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 7: We have more in common with medical examiners than doctors
This is often/normally true, but it's true for those who have similar level of experience/skill yet adhere to good system administration practices as well. (WHy not hire them instead?)
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 8: We know more about Windows than we'll ever let on
Yes - except for the type of veteran unix admin who meets the first page of traits. They're myopic and think their precious systems are the end-all, be-all.
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 9: Rebooting is almost never an option
Correct. Forget those pesky kernel or base system upgrades for security, or routine reboots for maintenance, which are all considered generally good practices. We'll just leave the systems running until it's time to replace them, or let the next guy deal with a completely undocumented system that hasn't been rebooted in years. Surely, nothing bad will happen, and the employer is wise to keep such people in their employ. (This is where the 'forensic' abilities that good admins have come into play.)
If some of these traits seem antisocial or difficult to understand from a lay perspective, that's because they are. Where others may see intractable, overly difficult methods, we see enlightenment, born of years of learning, experience, and most of all, logic.
Most of these are difficult to understand from a 'business continuity' or 'connected to the Internet' perspective. What i
FC is expensive, compared to what?
Unless you're using the (mostly shit) iSCSI software initiators, you'll be using iSCSI hardware initiators on 10gbit Ethernet - which is hardly cheap.
Do the math: to get > 1Gbit/s on your fabric-side links, you need to spend a copious amount if you're going 10gigE. Not only are the switches ungodly expensive compared to 1Gbit, but they're expensive compared to pretty much everything else - Infiniband or Fibrechannel. When it comes down to it, the biggest thing 10gig Ethernet has going for it is compatibility and people understanding Ethernet (it certainly isn't price or availability - it's easier to find high throughput FC and the like).
FC is great - for storage networks. Infiniband is likewise great, though it was way ahead of the curve (and I have no idea what's keeping it from competing now, aside from vendors not wanting to push it). They're comparable on price and similar on functionality. Ethernet keeps getting its push from 35 years of history.
Why anyone would want to encapsulate FC on top of Ethernet (thereby reducing any advantage FC might have), I have no idea. It sounds like one of those "let's fix our poor engineering with creative application of technology; it can bite the next poor fucker in the ass".
A big part of this is 'compliance testing'. It's hard (and expensive) to get a product approved for this-or-that "mission critical", regulated use.
Not only that, but you can guarantee the cogs of local government would make all-Linux (or whatever) locked-down workstations a no-go. Users would bitch, and that'd be the end of that: facebook would be available, "application" would be available, and so on - and it'd be all over. It doesn't matter which OS it's running on if there is no administration.
By "decent AV" do you mean "AV which management will approve and is made by Symantec or McAfee" or "AV which doesn't fit the previous description"? Because the former may have even caused this, directly.
Here's another, additive guess:
The hardware their mission-critical, lives-depend-on-seconds their 'server' ran on? It was probably something like a standalone server without redundant power supplies or disks. The system may have had redundant disks through software RAID. Odds are strong against the system having ECC RAM, or the hardware being on a maintenance plan. Odds are strong for the organization paying 5-10x as much for the 'certified' hardware than it cost the shitty vendor to build from their parts bin. In all likelihood, the system required a proprietary part or was designed in a fashion which would inhibit from working (at all) without a specific piece of hardware - which cost $10 at the time, but was only available from a single vendor, which has since gone out of business.
If I had a small sum of money for every variance of this I've seen, I'd be rich. It seems pretty much run of the mill in government and healthcare (ie anywhere that 'profit'/budget isn't a significant concern - "we'll just raise prices/taxes") for vendors to abuse some 'compliance' requirement, overlooking simple best practices for software and hardware. "We're SAS compliant! We're HIPAA compliant!" Yeah, well your product is still shit.
Let's put it this way:
I've got a Linksys wrt54G 1.1. It's 'old' hardware at this point.
I put dd-wrt on it almost immediately after getting it (first thing I did). About a year later, I went to tomato firmware, and then recently (around Xmas?) I went back to dd-wrt to see if i could get the VLAN tagging to work (I didn't, ended up getting a real managed switch). I just went back to tomato.
I didn't have to enter a single configuration change. The ROM settings were all preserved across the updates/changes.
For the performance gain you see by going to dd-wrt, I've seen the same leap by going from dd-wrt to the tomato firmware. (The features in dd-wrt out pace the weak hardware in the devices, anyway).
For a basic home wireless router, the hardware is pretty great. Don't ask it for much more, though. :)
Considering what else is out there, I don't think I'll be buying any more Linksys products. The cost/benefit doesn't pan out. Nearly identical equipment is available for half as much, and better is available for less.