1) Because Te'alk was such a believable character? IMO, "dreadlock dude" made a much better "Chewie" than Tealk. 2) Never seen it, can't comment. 3) The humanoid replicators were a bit of a Borgish type enemy, I think.
On the SGA characters... IMO, they were one of the best "science fiction" casts for a TV show in quite a long time. They were quite complimentary. The characters were all fairly well internally developed by the actors, too - particularly the "geeky" ones (Rodney, the Scottish doctor). Those guys made the show worth watching.
Yes, there was a strong correlation between the SGA characters and Star Trek: TOS. They had the "Kirk" character, the "Scotty" character, and the "Bones" character, sorta. The surfer dude was also a decent "Spock" stand-in (and you saw it in their interactions).
Yeah, I'm going to have to concur: having run this little 'test' on a handful of my sites, there's no plausible world in which "intermediate" is truly "intermediate".
I had a couple "stupid" sites rank in as intermediate, as well as a handful of sites I'd consider pompous and over-written (words used, structure, etc.) as "intermediate". It's somewhat flawed in its decisiveness.
My problem with wikimedia/wikipedia's donations is exactly that: they're being deceptive to push their agenda.
Here's an idea: why don't they have people buy their own books. Something free is rarely appreciated. (Compare and contrast: public library use vs. Barnes and Noble.)
As many have said, WP is a good source of information which is often biased and incorrect solely due to poor management and petty assholes.
Why would they want to weed out the kids, instead of having them available for the next prong of the attack?
The evident intent of the Wikileaks, and the resulting "Anonymous" group, is to incur government costs, crippling the government at every level. It's a multi-pronged DDoS: sure, the fax machines and the servers are one thing, but they're denying resources further down the line, as well:
* The people maintaining the servers * The people who rely upon the servers * The people who's lives are disrupted by inadvertently viewing said documents (against their pay grade) * The policy adjustments which must be made to account for the intelligence disruptions. * The years of building international relationships which are damaged.
* Significantly, the burden upon the justice system by the influx of hundreds+ of "10 years to life" charges resulting from the various above attacks.
It's pretty damning towards Wikileaks, IMO. If, indeed, the intent was to "make the government accountable" they'd be, I dunno, releasing documents which actually relate to that, first and foremost - not these international relations-damaging intel documents.
Maybe I'm reading into it too much, but it's quite evidently a conspiracy-in-the-open by the very definition of the coordination.
The math only works out for things like ships, trains, aircraft over the ocean, news organisations, military, spies, aircraft, and scientists. Even the phones on planes tend to use ground towers because of cost.
Ships, trains, and even aircraft can use shortwave radios, too. The same goes for all the others you mentioned - and these are tried and true tools which work well, despite inclement weather.
It's also not practical. People who are outside the bounds of a society that don't have wired or cellular service for phones likely do not have electricity, either, at this point in time.
Aside from that, you've got very few groups that need/could use them:
* government military * hikers/backpackers * explorers(%) *... can't think of any more.
What's more, the governments already has satellites in place for their own exclusive military/political needs, and backpackers/hikers have shortwave, CB, FRS, and I'm sure a dozen more (regionally specific frequency designations) which work better than a sat phone (not prone to inclement weather, etc.).
% - even for the few who might need something like this, there's still the issue of coverage: the arctic and antarctic poles don't exactly have many satellites over them, and the efforts are gov't run. Jungles have the problem of dense foliage.
Did you get laid for that one? I had several such opportunities resulting from obscene levels of gratitude.
I came to a school as a sophmore, and ended up staying in a co-ed mixed year dorm. The school didn't have a heavy (any) IT/CS focus, and this was right around when the quality of floppy disks and drives was "questionable" - on a good day, with very careful handling (1999-2001), you might get a disk to work in a drive that didn't write it. All it took was one successful dd recovery of a floppy disk and the word got around.
I loved that old Toshiba floppy drive: it was so much more reliable than the drives of the era, ran quickly, and could read pretty much any 'corrupt' data. Very rarely was anything unreadable.
As someone else said, being poor, on a time crunch, or limited by other people's failure to plan does seem to result in some pretty good 'hacks'. I didn't think the list they picked was all that spectacular: many of the "unconventional" ones have been done before by many others, I'm sure.
* Riser card creep? Hot glue (I always keep a gun handy now) * Routing traffic through a Linux laptop? That might be a "jackass hack", but many people do it on a planned, regular basis, and have for the better part of a decade. Move along... * Cook your drive? I've never heard of that trick, though I have frozen drives to recover data (bucket of ice, water, and a little water purifier salt, with a triple-bagged hard drive). * enable password on the network? Anyone using rancid and no encryption does this; I'm sure there are others. * heartbeat - I had to do this temporarily (or something like it). I used netcat. * The timezone settings? Pretty sure that there's nothing 'jackass hackish' about that - that's just a common part of remote system deployment. I've worked at several places which have done things in a similar fashion.
Other "jackass hacks" I've done (that I don't think are all that incredible):
* Expensive network MFD printer's built-in ethernet died - but it had USB. Hooked a laptop up and shared the printer, with scans getting automatically dumped to a shared path until a replacement could be acquired (small office). * Could not get a back plate adapter for a supermicro tower chassis from them on time to use a standard, quality ATX PSU, as I'd already had multiple (shit) PSUs from SM. Spent an hour that night at home cutting one from an old Dell Optiplex case via a cardboard stencil so I could get the system back up. * Plastic CPU mounting bracket used for the HSF on a first-generation Opteron cracked due to the OEM tension bracket being too tense. -Carefully- drilled 4 small holes in the board and attached the HSF via a cat5 insulated strand garrote, tensioned on the back of the board. * Modem bank had modems that were hanging with regularity. Better airflow helped, but no cigar. Determined the wall wort PSUs were getting warm and causing the modems to crash. Wired up an old(er) tower PSU to provide the power to the modems directly, and threw in a couple 12v fans for good measure. Problem solved. * Customer complains about server noise. Five minutes and a drop of machine oil on the CPU fan and the problem is 'fixed' - no charge, and the customer is happy. * Virtual server had a controller + disks blowout... put the system's VMs on a remote network share from backup and booted it from USB. Had it back up in slightly more time than it took to copy the images over.
These are just the tricks of the trade: we make hackish decisions like this every day to "just get the job done". Hopefully we can go back and fix them properly at a later time.
This is why I have decided to refuse external access (when possible) from my employers, and to not accept expulsion from the premises until I see them terminate my accounts (and change the passwords of any stupid 'shared' accounts).
Some time ago I was terminated by a vindictive boss. We're talking escape from the crazyhouse, straight jackets required formal, crazy. It was in a smaller town, and not long after I left, I started to hear outlandish rumours about myself: I was fired for groping a young female clerk; I was fired for stealing personal financial information; I was fired for looking at porn at work. You name it, I heard it. Surely, some of it was rumors, but I had some come up to me in person and say, "your old boss is saying such-and-such about you" because I'd made friends while there.
Thankfully, the boss was not smart enough to truly frame me for something like that, though the day I left I saw her attempting to do so (trying to access my workstation remotely). It would not have been outside her mentality to try to get into my home system(s) and then 'break in' to the facility's network using my (not terminated) credentials, had I any. Or, as is the case in many places, using a shared password which was never changed upon my termination.
This case, however, kinda sounds like one of those "I'm going to see if they canceled my accounts... oh, and I'm still really angry" affairs. Four days sounds about right for the reality of the situation to catch hold with the ex-employee. She gets in, starts snooping around, and then realizes what's at her finger tips... she gets carried away and it all goes down hill from there.
It can (and does) happen anywhere, not just in IT: construction workers go off-hinge and destroy property; lawyers and traders steal customers or other "proprietary business information" and bring it with them to a competitor - and so on. It's just that with IT, the impact is much more substantial to 'everyday' people because they see it in the performance/availability of the network systems those IT people set up and maintained - and therefore, it's more visible.
It never was "Free Speech", it was just vigilante justice. It's become 'mob justice' simply by the popular appeal.
I don't agree with much of what Wikileaks has done; I think Asange should be hung by his toes until his legs are free of blood. But at the same time, the "System" has wronged him - and more importantly, wronged the Process of Law. The System - government and corporations/banks - are way out of line. In these kinds of situations, it would seem that it takes Mob Rule for justice to be served.
That's a stupid requirement. Greek fire is known to have existed, and there are several very similar implementations recorded in other societies which are possibly the same/similar.
None of those are 'practical' by modern standards: they're dangerous, awkward (being error prone as a result) and largely "impractical". But it got results.
Well, it'd be interesting if they thought creatively.
Legend has it that the Archimedes myth happened. It was written, so it (or something like it) happened. So why not try to replicate it using the least-possible technology they can conceive (and modern engineering), arranged in as creative fashions as they can? It's been shown repeatedly that Greek engineering was not exactly limited in terms of creativity: we've found a number of very interesting, complex examples (some of which have not been fully determined in their utility).
For starters, what about crystals? The Greeks had diamonds, and diamonds can make a very good lens concentrator. And why not make a mirror focal arrangement from the mirrors and feed it through the concentrator? What about other stones used as concentrators - maybe the sails were coated with something which reacted with a specific wavelength? And so on.
Think creatively! You can still have a "Busted"/Unlikely conclusion while blowing shit up.:)
I'd have to agree - of the keys that need to go, Capslock is certainly the last. It has common-day functionality for many people.
Scroll lock, Break, and SysRq are useful, just not to the vast majority of people. Most people wouldn't miss them on a regular basis. They are, however, often re-programmed on point-of-sale systems for special functionality within the programs and the like.
F keys are used by a great number of applications. "Professionals" will rebind these within the applications, quite often. (My brother is an animator and does this, as does my father in Office and AutoCAD.) It saves a lot of time for routine tasks.
Doing away with 'standard' keyboard layouts would be a mistake. There are too many things which expect them, and it's what give "PCs" their power and cross-utility.
I use the Awesome window manager; I use capslock for meta. It's probably the 2nd most key on my keyboard (after space).
Meanwhile, CAPSLOCK ninnies will hold down Shift to get their work done. I've seen it happen when people's capslock key stops working "mysteriously".
There are already precious few 'meta' type keys on keyboards. Let's not 'standardize' on fewer, please: it makes work for those of us who work by the keyboard all the more difficult.
Surely you kid. Have you been paying attention to the news lately? See many mentions of Muslims in the past couple years? No?
That's because if a Muslim does something, it's now considered verboten to mention it (ever since the Ft. Worth shootings performed by a Muslim). There's a news blackout on it. Yet, there have been a number of Jewish temples which have been attacked by Muslims (in the US) since that time (for starters).
It's the classic lie, though. Altruism? Seriously?
Is that why people download porn, TV shows, and software? Altruism? Greed seems a better, more reasonable explanation for this.
IF they're the one doing the sharing, then it's not altruistic, it's tribal. They've got their group and they gain esteem and social standing by sharing. I know that was certainly the resulting case when my peers shared files when I was younger: the guys who shared their rips and/or downloads got a non-trivial social boost from doing so. One guy, who had entirely too much money for storage and bandwidth, ran an FTP server dedicated to sharing said files. He was a super geek, but somehow managed to leverage the social standing to become student council president for his Jr./Sr. years, as well as the homecoming king.
No shit. Will these cameras make it so people don't stomp the accelerator when they quickly back out?
I'd bet the camera wouldn't help here, and I have no doubt that people backing over people (not just kids) in the grocery parking lot is 99% of the cause for these. Dipshit puts his vehicle in reverse and immediately hits the accelerator, just as someone steps out...
People, there is a fucking reason why there is only one reverse gear. Go slow.
Who said anything about them being from the same batch? They were shipped together (two batches actually) but they had different batch serial numbers.
(Seriously, like that makes much difference. I've seen more correlation between who shipped the disks and the condition of the postage box than I have disk batching.)
What bothers me is that sensitive equipment which can be inperceptively damaged by such handling is difficult to detect.
Specifically, hard drives. They are the basis of our society, and damage from improper handling can often take days, weeks, or months to determine after the fact. It is not fun to receive a box of disks which has been thrown, jostled, and dropped needlessly; you find out at 3am when several members of an array fail at the same time.
It's slightly different with 'whole' servers, or large disk boxes: they're bigger and heavier and therefore harder to just 'throw around'.
Computer component companies would be well served amongst professionals if they were to start adding accelerometers and the like to boxes containing multiple drives. Being able to tell upon receipt if the box has been dropped repeatedly or forcefully would be very nice to know indeed.
I frequently come across the following vehicles for sale, in good working order (20-30 years old):
* Ford and Chevy vans and trucks (from S10s and Rangers up through the full size) * Volvos * Plymouth/Chrysler/etc. minivans * Subarus * Oldsmobiles (yep, still lots of those on the road) * Hondas (surprisingly)
The problem is that, in the 1986 and later range, ECUs and sensors became common. They were mostly crap, and they could drastically interfere with the actual functionality of the car. They were also incredibly expensive to replace (because only original manufacturer parts were available and the like). The core vehicles were still reliable, but if the shocks were getting worn and the ECU goes out around 100k, people assumed it was time to junk it.
The other side of the problem is that 'common' cars are not taken care of. There are plenty of 5-year-old vehicles in the junk yard because their owners were too stupid or too lazy to change the oil. The reason there are more trucks on the road than (say) sedans is because they cost more and the people who buy them (men) typically give a bit more of a damn about their reliable operation. They're taken care of, so they last.
I'm not saying they're all great, but your Camaro is clearly an exception: they've always been known for being of shoddy workmanship (or at least, during 1989).
Older vehicles are out there, and they are reliable. I personally drive a 1989 Ford Econoline van with mostly original parts (eg. battery, muffler - which was probably only replaced once, filters, etc. have all been changed). It's got 250k miles on it. The only reason I've not taken the time to replace parts on it that are worn is because I can get an entirely new van for around $1000 with half as many miles in just as good condition (which is considerable) and easily $1000 in 'better parts' (thinks like shocks, springs, etc.).
My father-in-law drives an '84 Volvo with 190k on it. A friend drove a '78 Blazer into the ground (ie, the body was so severely rusted it didn't make sense to drive it anymore) with about 160k miles on the odometer. My dad drives a Chevy S10 from '85 and uses the hell out of it - 190k on the odometer. My wife had an '89 Oldsmobile Cutlass Cierra that she drove to 160k without any major problems (still on the road 20k and 4 years later).
You seem to fail to realize that there are certain things which just need replacement in vehicles as they age. This holds particularly true if the vehicle sits outdoors when not in use: the elements take their toll on the paint and metal. The plastic gets embrittled. Our 2000 Focus is starting to show it's age at 120k miles. It needs new shocks and another transmission flush. These things happen - or, if they don't, the vehicle dies. The Focus easily has another 80k miles on it, I suspect - assuming it's taken care of. My van's rust cancer is likely going to hold back any significant repairs (though it wouldn't if I had a welder and knew how to use it), and I can replace it for a song.
Maybe, but doubtful. HFS+ has no features which would conceivably allow it to compensate for TRIM. It's likely the above benchmark is just a decent example of Amateur Hour - or HFS+ performance is just so abysmal to begin with, or that HFS+ isn't featureful enough to impact it, that it doesn't make a difference.
As with our Windows SSD testing, we filled the SSD with around 112GB of files from a USB hard disk - the files included OS files, game installs and media. We then deleted these files, then copied them across again, repeating the process ten times, so that we'd written over 1TB of data to the SSD
I'm guessing that, had they used a different data set each time, the results would have been different. (I'm unfamiliar with the HFS+ journaling method, but I'm going to guess it tries to put the same files in the same place, keeping record of deleted files. Maybe.)
In other news, Solaris doesn't do TRIM, either (or, at least, the derivatives do not - it was committed to OpenSolaris just before Oracle killed it and didn't quite make the cut, as I understand it). ZFS, however, has functionality that makes TRIM somewhat redundant.
I recently happened upon an old Popular Mechanics magazine from the 1950s. It dealt extensively with automotive topics. It struck me how much people had to know about their car's inner workings to properly maintain it.
Yeah? Except that's not true. The same thing still holds true today as it did then: the biggest change has that material science has improved (in most regards) our fuels, oils, and filters to the point where the same problems do not occur.
It was slightly different in the 50s, because we were at the epoch of engine design while other components (body construction, suspension, etc.) had not yet caught up. Consider, however, a 20-30 year old vehicle.
Those same old vehicles will operate just as reliably today as your newer vehicles (in many cases, more reliably. Vehicles today are plagued by the same problems as vehicles 20-30 years ago: there are still lemons and less reliable vehicles. (For instance, a friend just got rid of her 2007 Toyota (IIRC) because there was an engine defect which led to a shorter engine life.)
Today, you really don't have to know what kind of spark system your car has, or what kind of plugs it uses, or what kind of fuel delivery system it has.
Sure you do. You also still need to replace your fuel filters regularly (but I'm guessing most cars made in the last decade have never had it done). not doing so makes your finely tuned modern vehicle last a mere 100k or so miles before needing an overhaul (or, as is the case today due to the expense involved, scrapping it and getting a new one). Likewise, people don't replace their shocks, struts, etc. - but it should still be done.
You don't have to clean varnish out of the carbuerator every year, or have the piston rings done at 60k miles.
You don't have to replace the plugs and points every 10k miles.
You don't have to do that with older vehicles with modern plugs and "points", either. Again, material science has made them more reliable, and the actual damage done is less due to improvements in fuel.
Just keep gas in it, make sure you change the oil, and take it somewhere for minor maintenance every year or two. It should go >100k without much in the way of repairs, and get mileage that cars in the 1950's couldn't even get close to.
Have you driven in one of the land yachts from the 50s? Talk about an incredible ride. (Subjective value assessments are just that - subjective.)
I don't know what the hardware internals are. All I know is that the display looks great, the aluminum case feels really solid (not some glued together plastic crap), it has crashed only once in a year (and this was due to the square turd known as java), every time I go to open it up it just works, and the trackpad is so awesome I don't even miss a mouse. By comparison, every other trackpad I have used to date has been so far inferior that it might as well have been an old broken NES controller hacked into the USB port, or even a couple of sticks tied together and plugged into the headphone jack. Apple got it right.
I suspect that something like, say, your average SharePoint site, gets designed with the above demonstrated principles in mind. Who cares about the hardware, as long as it looks nice! It is very, very important to developers to know how the hardware works. I'd not want one who does not anywhere near my systems - it's that mentality that leads to (to use your earlier analogy of automobiles) people who always drive their vehicle redlining and then wonder why their breaks give out after 5k miles and the engine gives out after 20k miles.
What pisses me off about this is that it's "Apple exclusive" at this point. Why the hell?
In doing so, they are pissing off many other vendors - HP, Lenovo/IBM, and Dell, to name a few, but certainly LSI would like the ability to license the technology.
I have been anxiously waiting for over a year for Intel to release this technology. It appears to be the one, great hope for a truly fast, inexpensive, and universal device interconnect.
Right now, we've got a handful of transport interconnects in the 8-12Gb/s range, all of which suck for one reason or another:
* 10Gb Ethernet - not such a bad option, as it can utilize older infrastructure fabric and can be used for networking topology, as well. Your storage can be easily transported over it using traditional network software. * Fiberchannel - Expensive and very single-purpose, but still a better option than * Infiniband - cheapest, but horrible support. * Firewire - hitting a bandwidth limitation and hasn't really improved much in a while. * USB 3.0 - bound by the host/guest model and host-oriented. Horribly CPU bound, still. Decent 'general purpose' when you don't need a decent inter-host transport. * SAS - holds too much legacy crap in it from SCSI. Relatively cost, but you're still (usually) requiring one or more of the other device interconnects for a storage system.
The fact that Apple is holding onto the reigns of a single bus design which could change
The supreme irony is that Apple doesn't actually make anything which will be well suited to utilize Light Peak. Internetworking? Fast server storage? SAN? Nada: none of their platforms are suited for it, and pretty much anything you could do with Apple platforms can already be done using existing buses. (If anyone wonders why it might be said that Apple doesn't innovate, this is one good example: take something awesome and wrap it in pretty white plastic, doing nothing new with it.)
Talk about a disappointing "gimmick". Hopefully it'll reach mainstream within the next year or two, or it'll likely see an unfortunate demise similar to Firewire (low adoption rates, fringe technology), making Infiniband look all the more attractive.
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1) Because Te'alk was such a believable character? IMO, "dreadlock dude" made a much better "Chewie" than Tealk.
2) Never seen it, can't comment.
3) The humanoid replicators were a bit of a Borgish type enemy, I think.
On the SGA characters... IMO, they were one of the best "science fiction" casts for a TV show in quite a long time. They were quite complimentary. The characters were all fairly well internally developed by the actors, too - particularly the "geeky" ones (Rodney, the Scottish doctor). Those guys made the show worth watching.
Yes, there was a strong correlation between the SGA characters and Star Trek: TOS. They had the "Kirk" character, the "Scotty" character, and the "Bones" character, sorta. The surfer dude was also a decent "Spock" stand-in (and you saw it in their interactions).
Yeah, I'm going to have to concur: having run this little 'test' on a handful of my sites, there's no plausible world in which "intermediate" is truly "intermediate".
I had a couple "stupid" sites rank in as intermediate, as well as a handful of sites I'd consider pompous and over-written (words used, structure, etc.) as "intermediate". It's somewhat flawed in its decisiveness.
My problem with wikimedia/wikipedia's donations is exactly that: they're being deceptive to push their agenda.
Here's an idea: why don't they have people buy their own books. Something free is rarely appreciated. (Compare and contrast: public library use vs. Barnes and Noble.)
As many have said, WP is a good source of information which is often biased and incorrect solely due to poor management and petty assholes.
Why would they want to weed out the kids, instead of having them available for the next prong of the attack?
The evident intent of the Wikileaks, and the resulting "Anonymous" group, is to incur government costs, crippling the government at every level. It's a multi-pronged DDoS: sure, the fax machines and the servers are one thing, but they're denying resources further down the line, as well:
* The people maintaining the servers
* The people who rely upon the servers
* The people who's lives are disrupted by inadvertently viewing said documents (against their pay grade)
* The policy adjustments which must be made to account for the intelligence disruptions.
* The years of building international relationships which are damaged.
* Significantly, the burden upon the justice system by the influx of hundreds+ of "10 years to life" charges resulting from the various above attacks.
It's pretty damning towards Wikileaks, IMO. If, indeed, the intent was to "make the government accountable" they'd be, I dunno, releasing documents which actually relate to that, first and foremost - not these international relations-damaging intel documents.
Maybe I'm reading into it too much, but it's quite evidently a conspiracy-in-the-open by the very definition of the coordination.
And what is the per-minute rate charge? Data plans?
The math only works out for things like ships, trains, aircraft over the ocean, news organisations, military, spies, aircraft, and scientists. Even the phones on planes tend to use ground towers because of cost.
Ships, trains, and even aircraft can use shortwave radios, too. The same goes for all the others you mentioned - and these are tried and true tools which work well, despite inclement weather.
It's also not practical. People who are outside the bounds of a society that don't have wired or cellular service for phones likely do not have electricity, either, at this point in time.
Aside from that, you've got very few groups that need/could use them:
* government military ... can't think of any more.
* hikers/backpackers
* explorers(%)
*
What's more, the governments already has satellites in place for their own exclusive military/political needs, and backpackers/hikers have shortwave, CB, FRS, and I'm sure a dozen more (regionally specific frequency designations) which work better than a sat phone (not prone to inclement weather, etc.).
% - even for the few who might need something like this, there's still the issue of coverage: the arctic and antarctic poles don't exactly have many satellites over them, and the efforts are gov't run. Jungles have the problem of dense foliage.
Did you get laid for that one? I had several such opportunities resulting from obscene levels of gratitude.
I came to a school as a sophmore, and ended up staying in a co-ed mixed year dorm. The school didn't have a heavy (any) IT/CS focus, and this was right around when the quality of floppy disks and drives was "questionable" - on a good day, with very careful handling (1999-2001), you might get a disk to work in a drive that didn't write it. All it took was one successful dd recovery of a floppy disk and the word got around.
I loved that old Toshiba floppy drive: it was so much more reliable than the drives of the era, ran quickly, and could read pretty much any 'corrupt' data. Very rarely was anything unreadable.
As someone else said, being poor, on a time crunch, or limited by other people's failure to plan does seem to result in some pretty good 'hacks'. I didn't think the list they picked was all that spectacular: many of the "unconventional" ones have been done before by many others, I'm sure.
* Riser card creep? Hot glue (I always keep a gun handy now)
* Routing traffic through a Linux laptop? That might be a "jackass hack", but many people do it on a planned, regular basis, and have for the better part of a decade. Move along...
* Cook your drive? I've never heard of that trick, though I have frozen drives to recover data (bucket of ice, water, and a little water purifier salt, with a triple-bagged hard drive).
* enable password on the network? Anyone using rancid and no encryption does this; I'm sure there are others.
* heartbeat - I had to do this temporarily (or something like it). I used netcat.
* The timezone settings? Pretty sure that there's nothing 'jackass hackish' about that - that's just a common part of remote system deployment. I've worked at several places which have done things in a similar fashion.
Other "jackass hacks" I've done (that I don't think are all that incredible):
* Expensive network MFD printer's built-in ethernet died - but it had USB. Hooked a laptop up and shared the printer, with scans getting automatically dumped to a shared path until a replacement could be acquired (small office).
* Could not get a back plate adapter for a supermicro tower chassis from them on time to use a standard, quality ATX PSU, as I'd already had multiple (shit) PSUs from SM. Spent an hour that night at home cutting one from an old Dell Optiplex case via a cardboard stencil so I could get the system back up.
* Plastic CPU mounting bracket used for the HSF on a first-generation Opteron cracked due to the OEM tension bracket being too tense. -Carefully- drilled 4 small holes in the board and attached the HSF via a cat5 insulated strand garrote, tensioned on the back of the board.
* Modem bank had modems that were hanging with regularity. Better airflow helped, but no cigar. Determined the wall wort PSUs were getting warm and causing the modems to crash. Wired up an old(er) tower PSU to provide the power to the modems directly, and threw in a couple 12v fans for good measure. Problem solved.
* Customer complains about server noise. Five minutes and a drop of machine oil on the CPU fan and the problem is 'fixed' - no charge, and the customer is happy.
* Virtual server had a controller + disks blowout... put the system's VMs on a remote network share from backup and booted it from USB. Had it back up in slightly more time than it took to copy the images over.
These are just the tricks of the trade: we make hackish decisions like this every day to "just get the job done". Hopefully we can go back and fix them properly at a later time.
This is why I have decided to refuse external access (when possible) from my employers, and to not accept expulsion from the premises until I see them terminate my accounts (and change the passwords of any stupid 'shared' accounts).
Some time ago I was terminated by a vindictive boss. We're talking escape from the crazyhouse, straight jackets required formal, crazy. It was in a smaller town, and not long after I left, I started to hear outlandish rumours about myself: I was fired for groping a young female clerk; I was fired for stealing personal financial information; I was fired for looking at porn at work. You name it, I heard it. Surely, some of it was rumors, but I had some come up to me in person and say, "your old boss is saying such-and-such about you" because I'd made friends while there.
Thankfully, the boss was not smart enough to truly frame me for something like that, though the day I left I saw her attempting to do so (trying to access my workstation remotely). It would not have been outside her mentality to try to get into my home system(s) and then 'break in' to the facility's network using my (not terminated) credentials, had I any. Or, as is the case in many places, using a shared password which was never changed upon my termination.
This case, however, kinda sounds like one of those "I'm going to see if they canceled my accounts... oh, and I'm still really angry" affairs. Four days sounds about right for the reality of the situation to catch hold with the ex-employee. She gets in, starts snooping around, and then realizes what's at her finger tips... she gets carried away and it all goes down hill from there.
It can (and does) happen anywhere, not just in IT: construction workers go off-hinge and destroy property; lawyers and traders steal customers or other "proprietary business information" and bring it with them to a competitor - and so on. It's just that with IT, the impact is much more substantial to 'everyday' people because they see it in the performance/availability of the network systems those IT people set up and maintained - and therefore, it's more visible.
It never was "Free Speech", it was just vigilante justice. It's become 'mob justice' simply by the popular appeal.
I don't agree with much of what Wikileaks has done; I think Asange should be hung by his toes until his legs are free of blood. But at the same time, the "System" has wronged him - and more importantly, wronged the Process of Law. The System - government and corporations/banks - are way out of line. In these kinds of situations, it would seem that it takes Mob Rule for justice to be served.
That's a stupid requirement. Greek fire is known to have existed, and there are several very similar implementations recorded in other societies which are possibly the same/similar.
None of those are 'practical' by modern standards: they're dangerous, awkward (being error prone as a result) and largely "impractical". But it got results.
Well, it'd be interesting if they thought creatively.
Legend has it that the Archimedes myth happened. It was written, so it (or something like it) happened. So why not try to replicate it using the least-possible technology they can conceive (and modern engineering), arranged in as creative fashions as they can? It's been shown repeatedly that Greek engineering was not exactly limited in terms of creativity: we've found a number of very interesting, complex examples (some of which have not been fully determined in their utility).
For starters, what about crystals? The Greeks had diamonds, and diamonds can make a very good lens concentrator. And why not make a mirror focal arrangement from the mirrors and feed it through the concentrator? What about other stones used as concentrators - maybe the sails were coated with something which reacted with a specific wavelength? And so on.
Think creatively! You can still have a "Busted"/Unlikely conclusion while blowing shit up. :)
I'd have to agree - of the keys that need to go, Capslock is certainly the last. It has common-day functionality for many people.
Scroll lock, Break, and SysRq are useful, just not to the vast majority of people. Most people wouldn't miss them on a regular basis. They are, however, often re-programmed on point-of-sale systems for special functionality within the programs and the like.
F keys are used by a great number of applications. "Professionals" will rebind these within the applications, quite often. (My brother is an animator and does this, as does my father in Office and AutoCAD.) It saves a lot of time for routine tasks.
Doing away with 'standard' keyboard layouts would be a mistake. There are too many things which expect them, and it's what give "PCs" their power and cross-utility.
Yep.
I use the Awesome window manager; I use capslock for meta. It's probably the 2nd most key on my keyboard (after space).
Meanwhile, CAPSLOCK ninnies will hold down Shift to get their work done. I've seen it happen when people's capslock key stops working "mysteriously".
There are already precious few 'meta' type keys on keyboards. Let's not 'standardize' on fewer, please: it makes work for those of us who work by the keyboard all the more difficult.
Surely you kid. Have you been paying attention to the news lately? See many mentions of Muslims in the past couple years? No?
That's because if a Muslim does something, it's now considered verboten to mention it (ever since the Ft. Worth shootings performed by a Muslim). There's a news blackout on it. Yet, there have been a number of Jewish temples which have been attacked by Muslims (in the US) since that time (for starters).
It's the classic lie, though. Altruism? Seriously?
Is that why people download porn, TV shows, and software? Altruism? Greed seems a better, more reasonable explanation for this.
IF they're the one doing the sharing, then it's not altruistic, it's tribal. They've got their group and they gain esteem and social standing by sharing. I know that was certainly the resulting case when my peers shared files when I was younger: the guys who shared their rips and/or downloads got a non-trivial social boost from doing so. One guy, who had entirely too much money for storage and bandwidth, ran an FTP server dedicated to sharing said files. He was a super geek, but somehow managed to leverage the social standing to become student council president for his Jr./Sr. years, as well as the homecoming king.
So it's like Facebook or Slashdot, but with animated gifs and more line noise? Or...?
No shit. Will these cameras make it so people don't stomp the accelerator when they quickly back out?
I'd bet the camera wouldn't help here, and I have no doubt that people backing over people (not just kids) in the grocery parking lot is 99% of the cause for these. Dipshit puts his vehicle in reverse and immediately hits the accelerator, just as someone steps out...
People, there is a fucking reason why there is only one reverse gear. Go slow.
Probably has helped prevent a lot of rear-end collisions, especially on the highway when cars stop suddenly for an obstruction.
Why? Do rear-view window breaklights alert the drivers behind you better, or somehow enable them to slow more quickly?
Who said anything about them being from the same batch? They were shipped together (two batches actually) but they had different batch serial numbers.
(Seriously, like that makes much difference. I've seen more correlation between who shipped the disks and the condition of the postage box than I have disk batching.)
99.9% 'fragile handling' doesn't bother me.
What bothers me is that sensitive equipment which can be inperceptively damaged by such handling is difficult to detect.
Specifically, hard drives. They are the basis of our society, and damage from improper handling can often take days, weeks, or months to determine after the fact. It is not fun to receive a box of disks which has been thrown, jostled, and dropped needlessly; you find out at 3am when several members of an array fail at the same time.
It's slightly different with 'whole' servers, or large disk boxes: they're bigger and heavier and therefore harder to just 'throw around'.
Computer component companies would be well served amongst professionals if they were to start adding accelerometers and the like to boxes containing multiple drives. Being able to tell upon receipt if the box has been dropped repeatedly or forcefully would be very nice to know indeed.
I frequently come across the following vehicles for sale, in good working order (20-30 years old):
* Ford and Chevy vans and trucks (from S10s and Rangers up through the full size)
* Volvos
* Plymouth/Chrysler/etc. minivans
* Subarus
* Oldsmobiles (yep, still lots of those on the road)
* Hondas (surprisingly)
The problem is that, in the 1986 and later range, ECUs and sensors became common. They were mostly crap, and they could drastically interfere with the actual functionality of the car. They were also incredibly expensive to replace (because only original manufacturer parts were available and the like). The core vehicles were still reliable, but if the shocks were getting worn and the ECU goes out around 100k, people assumed it was time to junk it.
The other side of the problem is that 'common' cars are not taken care of. There are plenty of 5-year-old vehicles in the junk yard because their owners were too stupid or too lazy to change the oil. The reason there are more trucks on the road than (say) sedans is because they cost more and the people who buy them (men) typically give a bit more of a damn about their reliable operation. They're taken care of, so they last.
I'm not saying they're all great, but your Camaro is clearly an exception: they've always been known for being of shoddy workmanship (or at least, during 1989).
Older vehicles are out there, and they are reliable. I personally drive a 1989 Ford Econoline van with mostly original parts (eg. battery, muffler - which was probably only replaced once, filters, etc. have all been changed). It's got 250k miles on it. The only reason I've not taken the time to replace parts on it that are worn is because I can get an entirely new van for around $1000 with half as many miles in just as good condition (which is considerable) and easily $1000 in 'better parts' (thinks like shocks, springs, etc.).
My father-in-law drives an '84 Volvo with 190k on it. A friend drove a '78 Blazer into the ground (ie, the body was so severely rusted it didn't make sense to drive it anymore) with about 160k miles on the odometer. My dad drives a Chevy S10 from '85 and uses the hell out of it - 190k on the odometer. My wife had an '89 Oldsmobile Cutlass Cierra that she drove to 160k without any major problems (still on the road 20k and 4 years later).
You seem to fail to realize that there are certain things which just need replacement in vehicles as they age. This holds particularly true if the vehicle sits outdoors when not in use: the elements take their toll on the paint and metal. The plastic gets embrittled. Our 2000 Focus is starting to show it's age at 120k miles. It needs new shocks and another transmission flush. These things happen - or, if they don't, the vehicle dies. The Focus easily has another 80k miles on it, I suspect - assuming it's taken care of. My van's rust cancer is likely going to hold back any significant repairs (though it wouldn't if I had a welder and knew how to use it), and I can replace it for a song.
Maybe, but doubtful. HFS+ has no features which would conceivably allow it to compensate for TRIM. It's likely the above benchmark is just a decent example of Amateur Hour - or HFS+ performance is just so abysmal to begin with, or that HFS+ isn't featureful enough to impact it, that it doesn't make a difference.
As with our Windows SSD testing, we filled the SSD with around 112GB of files from a USB hard disk - the files included OS files, game installs and media. We then deleted these files, then copied them across again, repeating the process ten times, so that we'd written over 1TB of data to the SSD
I'm guessing that, had they used a different data set each time, the results would have been different. (I'm unfamiliar with the HFS+ journaling method, but I'm going to guess it tries to put the same files in the same place, keeping record of deleted files. Maybe.)
In other news, Solaris doesn't do TRIM, either (or, at least, the derivatives do not - it was committed to OpenSolaris just before Oracle killed it and didn't quite make the cut, as I understand it). ZFS, however, has functionality that makes TRIM somewhat redundant.
I recently happened upon an old Popular Mechanics magazine from the 1950s. It dealt extensively with automotive topics. It struck me how much people had to know about their car's inner workings to properly maintain it.
Yeah? Except that's not true. The same thing still holds true today as it did then: the biggest change has that material science has improved (in most regards) our fuels, oils, and filters to the point where the same problems do not occur.
It was slightly different in the 50s, because we were at the epoch of engine design while other components (body construction, suspension, etc.) had not yet caught up. Consider, however, a 20-30 year old vehicle.
Those same old vehicles will operate just as reliably today as your newer vehicles (in many cases, more reliably. Vehicles today are plagued by the same problems as vehicles 20-30 years ago: there are still lemons and less reliable vehicles. (For instance, a friend just got rid of her 2007 Toyota (IIRC) because there was an engine defect which led to a shorter engine life.)
Today, you really don't have to know what kind of spark system your car has, or what kind of plugs it uses, or what kind of fuel delivery system it has.
Sure you do. You also still need to replace your fuel filters regularly (but I'm guessing most cars made in the last decade have never had it done). not doing so makes your finely tuned modern vehicle last a mere 100k or so miles before needing an overhaul (or, as is the case today due to the expense involved, scrapping it and getting a new one). Likewise, people don't replace their shocks, struts, etc. - but it should still be done.
You don't have to clean varnish out of the carbuerator every year, or have the piston rings done at 60k miles.
You don't have to replace the plugs and points every 10k miles.
You don't have to do that with older vehicles with modern plugs and "points", either. Again, material science has made them more reliable, and the actual damage done is less due to improvements in fuel.
Just keep gas in it, make sure you change the oil, and take it somewhere for minor maintenance every year or two. It should go >100k without much in the way of repairs, and get mileage that cars in the 1950's couldn't even get close to.
Have you driven in one of the land yachts from the 50s? Talk about an incredible ride. (Subjective value assessments are just that - subjective.)
I don't know what the hardware internals are. All I know is that the display looks great, the aluminum case feels really solid (not some glued together plastic crap), it has crashed only once in a year (and this was due to the square turd known as java), every time I go to open it up it just works, and the trackpad is so awesome I don't even miss a mouse. By comparison, every other trackpad I have used to date has been so far inferior that it might as well have been an old broken NES controller hacked into the USB port, or even a couple of sticks tied together and plugged into the headphone jack. Apple got it right.
I suspect that something like, say, your average SharePoint site, gets designed with the above demonstrated principles in mind. Who cares about the hardware, as long as it looks nice! It is very, very important to developers to know how the hardware works. I'd not want one who does not anywhere near my systems - it's that mentality that leads to (to use your earlier analogy of automobiles) people who always drive their vehicle redlining and then wonder why their breaks give out after 5k miles and the engine gives out after 20k miles.
What pisses me off about this is that it's "Apple exclusive" at this point. Why the hell?
In doing so, they are pissing off many other vendors - HP, Lenovo/IBM, and Dell, to name a few, but certainly LSI would like the ability to license the technology.
I have been anxiously waiting for over a year for Intel to release this technology. It appears to be the one, great hope for a truly fast, inexpensive, and universal device interconnect.
Right now, we've got a handful of transport interconnects in the 8-12Gb/s range, all of which suck for one reason or another:
* 10Gb Ethernet - not such a bad option, as it can utilize older infrastructure fabric and can be used for networking topology, as well. Your storage can be easily transported over it using traditional network software.
* Fiberchannel - Expensive and very single-purpose, but still a better option than
* Infiniband - cheapest, but horrible support.
* Firewire - hitting a bandwidth limitation and hasn't really improved much in a while.
* USB 3.0 - bound by the host/guest model and host-oriented. Horribly CPU bound, still. Decent 'general purpose' when you don't need a decent inter-host transport.
* SAS - holds too much legacy crap in it from SCSI. Relatively cost, but you're still (usually) requiring one or more of the other device interconnects for a storage system.
The fact that Apple is holding onto the reigns of a single bus design which could change
The supreme irony is that Apple doesn't actually make anything which will be well suited to utilize Light Peak. Internetworking? Fast server storage? SAN? Nada: none of their platforms are suited for it, and pretty much anything you could do with Apple platforms can already be done using existing buses. (If anyone wonders why it might be said that Apple doesn't innovate, this is one good example: take something awesome and wrap it in pretty white plastic, doing nothing new with it.)
Talk about a disappointing "gimmick". Hopefully it'll reach mainstream within the next year or two, or it'll likely see an unfortunate demise similar to Firewire (low adoption rates, fringe technology), making Infiniband look all the more attractive.