Not so fast - after all, guess what Cisco chained into their Nexus line of switches? (NX-OS is not using a FBSD kernel, after all.)
It's not that FBSD is failed or failing, but because Linux has a much bigger mindshare nowadays, which means you can more easily get the real esoteric and custom bits for your needs, especially without having to write it all yourself.
Yes, I know FBSD has linux compatibility and stuff, but that's not the point.
Speaking of which, I wonder how long it will take for Linux to 'metastasize' within the organization?
First, it fulfills a couple of roles here and there in MSFT. Next, they have to make their own in-house distro. Next, they discover that it's kind of useful for a few internal roles within a few internal departments (esp. budget-starved ones). Next...?
Of course a MacBook is going to blow a three hundred dollar netbook out of the water, a twelve hundred dollar quality laptop? Not so much.
The $800 Dell (forgot which line) lasted less than six months before the motherboard fried...
The $1000 (-ish) HP EliteBook ran waaaaaaaaay too slow in spite of its i7, and ate three separate hard drives (and got RMA'd twice) before I gave up on it. Lasted less than a year.
The $1100 Samsung RC-512 felt like cheap plastic (the laptop lid actually *flexed* whenever I picked it up), and towards the end of its useful life I was forced to set CPU affinity on certain applications, or else I'd blow the thermals and watch the laptop shut down (usually mid-render). It lasted 13 months.
I'm sure there are $1200 15" laptops out there that hold up to even moderate punishment, but I saved a metric ton of time and money by not having to find out the hard way, and my 'overpriced' MBP is screaming along just fine at 26 months and counting, with no signs of slowing down or letting up.
For disposable stuff like phones, I have and recommend the Android route. You don't keep a phone for long enough (on average) to call it an investment, since 2 years is a bit of a stretch for most owners.
For the relatively durable stuff? It depends.
For the typical email/Facebook/flash-game user, a typical i3 or i5 laptop for $300-$500 or so is just fine, and will last 2 years on average if treated gingerly.
Now for me, it's a bit different... I bought a 15" MacBook Pro as my primary laptop in mid-2013 and it's still rolling along just fine at full speed. I drag it around nearly everywhere I go, especially when traveling on business. It's been a smarter investment on my part by paying $2,000 up-front for something light/fast that I intend to keep for 3-4 years, instead of spending $750-$1100 every year on Dell/Samsung/HP laptops that either wear out or break down (or just literally break) every 12-18 months (I demand the speed and tend to abuse the machinery CPU-wise. Most CG artist type hobbyists do.)
So in most user cases, it likely doesn't make sense. In my case, even if I wanted to run Windows, I'd still use a Mac to do it, if only because the hardware is top-notch and (more importantly) durable.
Dunno - my wife has and loves her iPhone, but I bought a G2 earlier this year...
I actually prefer my little G2, and it has better battery life than my wife's phone. I have the same 3k mAh battery you do (which is why I bought it); it puts up with a day of very heavy use, and almost always has 33% or so left when I charge it at night, in spite of having Airwatch on the thing ($@#%ing corporate email security requirements...)
If it helps, I disable/delete the shitware (especially things like Facebook), and am extremely picky about what goes on my phone and what does not.
Many Android devices have alternate OSes (Cyanogenmod, etc) that support the device for far longer than the OEM did.
To be fair, that's not a very high bar... most Android OEMs never bother to support their devices. To be doubly fair, iPhones can be jailbroken too.
And no, I don't own an iPhone (I have an LG G2, because paying $215 for a decent unlocked GSM phone is a lot smarter than a contract or an overly-expensive new-shiny).
Dunno... most women will use it a crutch, but that little rubber toy won't validate emotions, cuddle with her, pamper her, take her out to dinner... women generally need more than the occasional orgasm to consider their sex-lives as being fruitful.
Most guys on the other hand? Well, considering that a huge percentage of us guys treat women as not much more than disposable toys until full mental maturity? Well, you get the idea.
That post ^^^ is what mod points are for, and it's dead-on.
Men and women do view sex differently... for women, it fulfills an emotional need more than physical desire. For men, more about physical need (as to why, the answer lies with how men and women are mentally hard-wired in general. )
For most men, as long as it is convincing enough in movement and sound during the moment, that is pretty much sufficient. For most women, the AI had damned well better be good enough to handle long conversations about highly emotional subjects, and that's not going to happen for quite a long time. Given the likelihood is a sufficiently sentient AI, I can see how women would more easily dismiss the idea.
This woman in particular? I understand her position as well - it's hard enough for the average woman to compete for a man's attention as it is (unless she lives somewhere that women are a pronounced demographic minority, such as China). As a woman gets older, that competition only intensifies and gets harder to win... see also the stereotypical (but nonetheless too often true) middle-aged male dumping his middle-aged wife for some younger, prettier version.
Now add a convincing-enough sexbot product to the mix, and I suspect that this won't be the only woman complaining rather loudly about it.
...how about a "we don't give a shit about your oversized monetized data-vacuum" button?
Okay, maybe too harsh, and I get it - the website has become dominant, and most folks are on it at least 1-2x a day, if not longer. But honestly, when some tiny website feature becomes breathless news, maybe we got our priorities screwed up?
Wyden is not a member of a party that I tend to vote for, and his recent vote on the Iran deal (among others) leaves me rather disgusted at him for being not much more than a party toadie when it comes to most issues. That said, I will freely admit that he's a lot more clued-in on technical issues than damned near everyone else in the Senate, and has done more for tech than nearly anyone else there.
It's one thing to use them on a voluntary basis in order to test the efficacy of a new drug. In such a case, it makes perfect sense.
However, it's another thing entirely for a health insurance company to require their use (or face a massive premium hike, etc).
Then again, on a slight tangent, I do find it interesting that more and more drugs are coming out these days which pretty much require the drug's use for, quite literally, the rest of your life (usually heart medications).
Depends on the IT department and its relationship with the ISP, really. 50 BTC? Meh - it'd take less than a handful of hours to blackhole a DDoS successfully, or at least dampen it to the point of ineffectiveness... it'd cost way less than that in the network engineer's time, even if the exchange rate were $3 per. At worst, there's no shame at all in telling the world: "Some stupid script kiddies tried to crapflood our site, but we shut them down in short order" (well, translated to marketese, anyway).
Up the stakes - odds are perfect that they're probably renting botnet time (you'd have to if you want an even halfway effective DDoS attack), so let's see how much it'll cost the kiddies before they realize that it's getting too expensive and the results aren't really worth it. At a previous employer, we saw something similar (minus the threats), and it only ate maybe 6 hours of time spread over 3 different days, with a noticeable slowdown in site performance for about 30-45 minutes each time, but that was the worst of it. Not even worth bothering over, ransom-wise.
Overall though, it's easier to just spam-file and ignore the threats (most of which would likely be bluffs anyway), or at most you tell the little chump to fuck off. If you have Akamai or a similar caching service, you can maybe call 'em out on your website and dare them to do their worst. *shrug*
Actually, the first chapter (given inter-office romances and the all-too-often stupid results that come about from them) should be "How not to shit where you eat".
Ah yeah I forgot about the open-borders part, which clearly doesn't fit mainstream conservatism.
I didn't realize the EU was "mainstream conservative", given their fairly strong reticence viz. Syrian and Libyan refugees... Oh, wait, you meant *here*, in North America, where the US is the only nation that actually allows immigration without the immigrant being massively wealthy (or have a job waiting, or be married to a native) first.
As a society, we have a real inequality issue and I'm sympathetic to those who can't afford to participate in our shared culture
.
Dunno... back when I was young and poor, I paid $10/mo for a cheap dialup ISP account (with 200 whopping hours a month access time), and literally *built* my rigs from spare parts and carcasses at the local computer shops (to give you an idea, my very first VGA monitor needed a new capacitor and I still paid $75 for it). Sometimes I'd straight-up barter parts if I stumbled across something useful. While world+dog was using the brand-new Pentiums and 56k modems running a shiny new copy of Windows 95, I was doing just fine on a 14k modem and a 386SX running RedHat.
Even today, it's almost trivial to buy a used smartphone (or even a new one w/ an older spec set), then get a $35/mo Net10/Tracfone plan. You won't have all the shiny goodness like the guys with the just-released iPhone and the $100/mo Verizon plan, but it's enough to get what you need. Even as late as last year, I used a Huawei 880c that I paid $100 for off-contract, and paid $45/mo for a 3G Net10 plan. You can get an equivalent low-end smartphone right now at the nearest Wal-Mart for like $50 at most. Give the cheapness of it all, it's almost doable on minimum wage.
I think that's what GP and etc were talking about - you can still get the participatory bits of it all, without blowing a zillion bucks to do it. Unfortunately, too many folks who cannot afford it go get the Galaxy/iPhone shiny stuff not because they need it, but because 'status'.
and another empty threat. you'll be on windows 10 in a few years, you'll see.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAaaaa!
(...typed on my MacBook Pro at work while waiting for a build to complete. My MacBook Pro at home says you're full of it too, as well as my Linux home machinery...)
In all honesty, transitioning away form Windows was once a long, drawn-out process. I kept a Windows box around for years because of gaming, and CG applications (3DS Max specifically) that only worked on Windows. However, bit-by-bit, I was able to move my CG tools and gaming habits over to either Linux or OSX (or in the case of CG, I found better that worked on OSX, so I re-worked how I did things to adapt) - with each change, the Windows box became less and less used. It went from a dedicated Windows box, to a dual-boot rig, and eventually, I dumped the Windows partition entirely.
Fast forward to today, where the one and only Windows machine in my possession is an Windows 7 VM sitting on my MacBook. I might start it up once every 8 months or so to fire up an old CG application or tool, but usually I only do it to convert a really old/archived CG file into something I can use in OSX.
In my wife's case, the transition was almost instant: Two years ago, she took one look at Windows 8, and went with a new iPad instead. Eventually she discovered that sometimes she needed a laptop, but I have one loaded with Linux Mint for her that she uses just fine, and has actually come to prefer using it over Windows.
TL;DR - sometimes it's drop-easy to convert (especially for ordinary users who don't do much with a computer), sometimes it takes time (for us crazy people who do a lot of stuff on one.)
Well, that depends on the petition. If the petition bolsters the administration's standing/reputation/agenda, they'll happily respond. If it embarrasses or runs counter to the agenda, then it wouldn't matter if it had every US citizen signing the petition... it'll get ignored or given a form response with no action taken.
I think this unofficial policy began approximately when the White House realized that their little petition website actually got used by the public (and wasn't just a window-dressing "oh look we'll respond to you directly here even though you sheep will never use it" type of thing.)
Agreed with sibling... how many of the petitioners are actual US citizens? After all, an Internet-based petition is open to the world, and geolocation ain't that hard to circumvent (and that's not even counting the number of H1-B's signing it from their own home, US-geolocated, IP addys).
Slashdot Mirror
Not so fast - after all, guess what Cisco chained into their Nexus line of switches? (NX-OS is not using a FBSD kernel, after all.)
It's not that FBSD is failed or failing, but because Linux has a much bigger mindshare nowadays, which means you can more easily get the real esoteric and custom bits for your needs, especially without having to write it all yourself.
Yes, I know FBSD has linux compatibility and stuff, but that's not the point.
Speaking of which, I wonder how long it will take for Linux to 'metastasize' within the organization?
First, it fulfills a couple of roles here and there in MSFT. Next, they have to make their own in-house distro. Next, they discover that it's kind of useful for a few internal roles within a few internal departments (esp. budget-starved ones). Next...?
Slowly, surely... ?
That said, I'm not the kind of person that views a six hundred dollar smart phone as "disposable", so I'm not really apple's key demographic.
I treat phones as disposable because they are all too easily dropped, stolen, scratched, beaten-up, lost...
Of course a MacBook is going to blow a three hundred dollar netbook out of the water, a twelve hundred dollar quality laptop? Not so much.
The $800 Dell (forgot which line) lasted less than six months before the motherboard fried...
The $1000 (-ish) HP EliteBook ran waaaaaaaaay too slow in spite of its i7, and ate three separate hard drives (and got RMA'd twice) before I gave up on it. Lasted less than a year.
The $1100 Samsung RC-512 felt like cheap plastic (the laptop lid actually *flexed* whenever I picked it up), and towards the end of its useful life I was forced to set CPU affinity on certain applications, or else I'd blow the thermals and watch the laptop shut down (usually mid-render). It lasted 13 months.
I'm sure there are $1200 15" laptops out there that hold up to even moderate punishment, but I saved a metric ton of time and money by not having to find out the hard way, and my 'overpriced' MBP is screaming along just fine at 26 months and counting, with no signs of slowing down or letting up.
It's a cheap phone I bought for the purpose. And yes, it works wonderfully.
Depends, really.
For disposable stuff like phones, I have and recommend the Android route. You don't keep a phone for long enough (on average) to call it an investment, since 2 years is a bit of a stretch for most owners.
For the relatively durable stuff? It depends.
For the typical email/Facebook/flash-game user, a typical i3 or i5 laptop for $300-$500 or so is just fine, and will last 2 years on average if treated gingerly.
Now for me, it's a bit different... I bought a 15" MacBook Pro as my primary laptop in mid-2013 and it's still rolling along just fine at full speed. I drag it around nearly everywhere I go, especially when traveling on business. It's been a smarter investment on my part by paying $2,000 up-front for something light/fast that I intend to keep for 3-4 years, instead of spending $750-$1100 every year on Dell/Samsung/HP laptops that either wear out or break down (or just literally break) every 12-18 months (I demand the speed and tend to abuse the machinery CPU-wise. Most CG artist type hobbyists do.)
So in most user cases, it likely doesn't make sense. In my case, even if I wanted to run Windows, I'd still use a Mac to do it, if only because the hardware is top-notch and (more importantly) durable.
Dunno - my wife has and loves her iPhone, but I bought a G2 earlier this year...
I actually prefer my little G2, and it has better battery life than my wife's phone. I have the same 3k mAh battery you do (which is why I bought it); it puts up with a day of very heavy use, and almost always has 33% or so left when I charge it at night, in spite of having Airwatch on the thing ($@#%ing corporate email security requirements...)
If it helps, I disable/delete the shitware (especially things like Facebook), and am extremely picky about what goes on my phone and what does not.
Many Android devices have alternate OSes (Cyanogenmod, etc) that support the device for far longer than the OEM did.
To be fair, that's not a very high bar... most Android OEMs never bother to support their devices. To be doubly fair, iPhones can be jailbroken too.
And no, I don't own an iPhone (I have an LG G2, because paying $215 for a decent unlocked GSM phone is a lot smarter than a contract or an overly-expensive new-shiny).
I don't have sex with my mother either, or do you not know what context is?
Dunno... most women will use it a crutch, but that little rubber toy won't validate emotions, cuddle with her, pamper her, take her out to dinner... women generally need more than the occasional orgasm to consider their sex-lives as being fruitful.
Most guys on the other hand? Well, considering that a huge percentage of us guys treat women as not much more than disposable toys until full mental maturity? Well, you get the idea.
That post ^^^ is what mod points are for, and it's dead-on.
Men and women do view sex differently... for women, it fulfills an emotional need more than physical desire. For men, more about physical need (as to why, the answer lies with how men and women are mentally hard-wired in general. )
For most men, as long as it is convincing enough in movement and sound during the moment, that is pretty much sufficient. For most women, the AI had damned well better be good enough to handle long conversations about highly emotional subjects, and that's not going to happen for quite a long time. Given the likelihood is a sufficiently sentient AI, I can see how women would more easily dismiss the idea.
This woman in particular? I understand her position as well - it's hard enough for the average woman to compete for a man's attention as it is (unless she lives somewhere that women are a pronounced demographic minority, such as China). As a woman gets older, that competition only intensifies and gets harder to win... see also the stereotypical (but nonetheless too often true) middle-aged male dumping his middle-aged wife for some younger, prettier version.
Now add a convincing-enough sexbot product to the mix, and I suspect that this won't be the only woman complaining rather loudly about it.
...how about a "we don't give a shit about your oversized monetized data-vacuum" button?
Okay, maybe too harsh, and I get it - the website has become dominant, and most folks are on it at least 1-2x a day, if not longer. But honestly, when some tiny website feature becomes breathless news, maybe we got our priorities screwed up?
Disclaimer - I live in Oregon.
Wyden is not a member of a party that I tend to vote for, and his recent vote on the Iran deal (among others) leaves me rather disgusted at him for being not much more than a party toadie when it comes to most issues. That said, I will freely admit that he's a lot more clued-in on technical issues than damned near everyone else in the Senate, and has done more for tech than nearly anyone else there.
It's one thing to use them on a voluntary basis in order to test the efficacy of a new drug. In such a case, it makes perfect sense.
However, it's another thing entirely for a health insurance company to require their use (or face a massive premium hike, etc).
Then again, on a slight tangent, I do find it interesting that more and more drugs are coming out these days which pretty much require the drug's use for, quite literally, the rest of your life (usually heart medications).
Ah, we see how people dive in to defend the establishment by likening an anti-establishment candidate to the Nazis.
Trump and Sanders have the most important thing in common: they'll actually change something if elected.
Unless Congress gets flushed good and hard, that statement is highly unlikely.
Depends on the IT department and its relationship with the ISP, really. 50 BTC? Meh - it'd take less than a handful of hours to blackhole a DDoS successfully, or at least dampen it to the point of ineffectiveness... it'd cost way less than that in the network engineer's time, even if the exchange rate were $3 per. At worst, there's no shame at all in telling the world: "Some stupid script kiddies tried to crapflood our site, but we shut them down in short order" (well, translated to marketese, anyway).
Up the stakes - odds are perfect that they're probably renting botnet time (you'd have to if you want an even halfway effective DDoS attack), so let's see how much it'll cost the kiddies before they realize that it's getting too expensive and the results aren't really worth it. At a previous employer, we saw something similar (minus the threats), and it only ate maybe 6 hours of time spread over 3 different days, with a noticeable slowdown in site performance for about 30-45 minutes each time, but that was the worst of it. Not even worth bothering over, ransom-wise.
Overall though, it's easier to just spam-file and ignore the threats (most of which would likely be bluffs anyway), or at most you tell the little chump to fuck off. If you have Akamai or a similar caching service, you can maybe call 'em out on your website and dare them to do their worst. *shrug*
In all seriousness though, how does such a massive distraction *not* interfere with a job where you have to, you know, focus?
(...not that I'd complain or anything, but seriously...)
Actually, the first chapter (given inter-office romances and the all-too-often stupid results that come about from them) should be "How not to shit where you eat".
I take it you didn't see where I mentioned the "EU", not "Germany".
Clue: migrant workers are not illegal aliens; there's actually a class of guest worker visa for the purpose.
Ah yeah I forgot about the open-borders part, which clearly doesn't fit mainstream conservatism.
I didn't realize the EU was "mainstream conservative", given their fairly strong reticence viz. Syrian and Libyan refugees ... Oh, wait, you meant *here*, in North America, where the US is the only nation that actually allows immigration without the immigrant being massively wealthy (or have a job waiting, or be married to a native) first.
Careful where you throw that rock, big guy. ;)
As a society, we have a real inequality issue and I'm sympathetic to those who can't afford to participate in our shared culture
.
Dunno... back when I was young and poor, I paid $10/mo for a cheap dialup ISP account (with 200 whopping hours a month access time), and literally *built* my rigs from spare parts and carcasses at the local computer shops (to give you an idea, my very first VGA monitor needed a new capacitor and I still paid $75 for it). Sometimes I'd straight-up barter parts if I stumbled across something useful. While world+dog was using the brand-new Pentiums and 56k modems running a shiny new copy of Windows 95, I was doing just fine on a 14k modem and a 386SX running RedHat.
Even today, it's almost trivial to buy a used smartphone (or even a new one w/ an older spec set), then get a $35/mo Net10/Tracfone plan. You won't have all the shiny goodness like the guys with the just-released iPhone and the $100/mo Verizon plan, but it's enough to get what you need. Even as late as last year, I used a Huawei 880c that I paid $100 for off-contract, and paid $45/mo for a 3G Net10 plan. You can get an equivalent low-end smartphone right now at the nearest Wal-Mart for like $50 at most. Give the cheapness of it all, it's almost doable on minimum wage.
I think that's what GP and etc were talking about - you can still get the participatory bits of it all, without blowing a zillion bucks to do it. Unfortunately, too many folks who cannot afford it go get the Galaxy/iPhone shiny stuff not because they need it, but because 'status'.
and another empty threat. you'll be on windows 10 in a few years, you'll see.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAaaaa!
(...typed on my MacBook Pro at work while waiting for a build to complete. My MacBook Pro at home says you're full of it too, as well as my Linux home machinery...)
In all honesty, transitioning away form Windows was once a long, drawn-out process. I kept a Windows box around for years because of gaming, and CG applications (3DS Max specifically) that only worked on Windows. However, bit-by-bit, I was able to move my CG tools and gaming habits over to either Linux or OSX (or in the case of CG, I found better that worked on OSX, so I re-worked how I did things to adapt) - with each change, the Windows box became less and less used. It went from a dedicated Windows box, to a dual-boot rig, and eventually, I dumped the Windows partition entirely.
Fast forward to today, where the one and only Windows machine in my possession is an Windows 7 VM sitting on my MacBook. I might start it up once every 8 months or so to fire up an old CG application or tool, but usually I only do it to convert a really old/archived CG file into something I can use in OSX.
In my wife's case, the transition was almost instant: Two years ago, she took one look at Windows 8, and went with a new iPad instead. Eventually she discovered that sometimes she needed a laptop, but I have one loaded with Linux Mint for her that she uses just fine, and has actually come to prefer using it over Windows.
TL;DR - sometimes it's drop-easy to convert (especially for ordinary users who don't do much with a computer), sometimes it takes time (for us crazy people who do a lot of stuff on one.)
Well, that depends on the petition. If the petition bolsters the administration's standing/reputation/agenda, they'll happily respond. If it embarrasses or runs counter to the agenda, then it wouldn't matter if it had every US citizen signing the petition... it'll get ignored or given a form response with no action taken.
I think this unofficial policy began approximately when the White House realized that their little petition website actually got used by the public (and wasn't just a window-dressing "oh look we'll respond to you directly here even though you sheep will never use it" type of thing.)
Agreed with sibling... how many of the petitioners are actual US citizens? After all, an Internet-based petition is open to the world, and geolocation ain't that hard to circumvent (and that's not even counting the number of H1-B's signing it from their own home, US-geolocated, IP addys).