So, I just want to chime in here on the poster - Phillip Greenspun. Most of you won't remember it, but for those of building out web pages back in 1993, there wasn't exactly a lot of content. Phillip had a ton of pictures online and an online gallery before that was even a thing. Jerry Yang was still updating his content list of Internet by hand. I feel like back then the web was small enough that you really could see nearly everything of interest. Anyway, that was just a name I hadn't seen in a long time.
Most of the time when I read a machine learning or AI story it seems fairly benign and reasonable.
Other times I feel a pit form in the bottom of my stomach and wonder how close to the tipping point we our to creating our robot overlords.
Can we all just take a minute to sit back and remind ourselves this is not normal. Besides the fact it makes no sense to have bombers on standby when we have plenty of missiles that'll do the job faster and easier, this is just one more bizarre thing that seems to be bending to the will of a crackpot president. I hope if he decides to use nukes that Tillerson and Mattis are in the room to beat the living shit out of him before anyone hears the order.
I think this story is a bit overblown and sensationalized. I think it was exactly the kind of candid responses people like. In nearly everyone one of those cases he followed up with very technical details of why things were designed the way they were.
And to be fair, it was held on/r/space as opposed to/r/spacex and the/r/spacex community sort of invaded the AMA and posted the real technical questions. The nice thing there being a much higher level of technical questions were asked, but it did serve to alienate a lot of the/r/space community who probably isn't used to hearing about deep throttling ratios of methalox engines, etc.
Yup. I have a few sites using iDrive in production as the primary cloud backup. I haven't done an extensive recovery operation yet, but I have done the usual recover of misc docs. Works great, simple to configure, lots of great options available.
Their blog doesn't have a link for comments of any kind. This update is truly horrid. Go fuck yourself, Google. I like compact screen layouts so I don't have to scroll.
Something doesn't seem right here. I live in Summit County, CO for 7 years and no one who lives in Summit County is actually from Summit County, or really even Colorado. Furthermore, even fewer are even year round residents. There's almost no one over the 65 there, the vast majority of the population are younger to early middle age ski bums. The same goes for Eagle County and to some degree Pitkin. Something about the ski bum population is skewing those results.
(On a side note, a former Air Force general, Don Kutyna, who ran the US Space Command for a bit skied nearly every day and he was 70+ at the time. Over at Copper Mountain we had Frank Walters who was 80+ and skied hundreds of days a year.)
Yeah, I had to do something like that last year. Campus environment, the wifi was off a Ubiquiti controller two firewalls upstream, and the wired network was a mess because of PCI compliance. It took nearly two days to make a single Sonos system work because a whole network edge had to be rearchitected with a slow man in a boat ferrying packets across the river Styx.
The next time I had to do it, I just slammed in a rogue wifi router.
I'm so sick of businesses buying Sonos and expecting them to magically work. Oh, yeah, awesome in your house when you don't have multicasting turned off and aren't worried about crossing VLAN's. Maybe John can spend his time figuring out how to just put an option for a static IP on the damn things.
Here: https://www.cnet.com/au/produc...
I didn't even bother searching - that was the first Google review I looked at. That system had a 160GB hard drive with a minor upgrade to 250GB.
I've been getting 128GB SSD drives in laptops for the past few years, but they almost never work any more in any of my clients businesses. The biggest thing driving it is Dropbox, Google Drive and box.com usage. So many companies (or departments) are ditching fileservers and moving to those systems and they think that the storage just magically lives elsewhere. Instead, you end up with 30GB of cloud storage saved locally on every device.
I'm getting so sick of laptop manufacturers, in particular Dell, offering specs from 2010. You should just be shot if you ship a laptop with 4GB of RAM. Start at 8. No hard drive should be smaller than 200GB. Don't even think of putting anything less than an i5 in an XPS or Latitude line.
I'd love to see Facebook buy Snopes and then integrate that into their news feed. Then they can add a Bullshit Meter to each story. The thing is, the best alt-right news isn't 100% fake; the best ones are about 90% true. It's when they completely manipulate information to present a twisted argument of when it all goes wrong.
When companies don't value their IT assets and understand the importance of having "insurance policies" on their digital IP, it's probably not a place to work.
This was clearly in the insanity realm. They had dual PIX firewalls set up in some kind of redundant mode. Good stuff. Except there was no way to get a Cisco (or any other) Smartnet contract on it. They had lost the enable password years before and no one understood exactly how the failover actually worked or the details of the settings on it. They were 14 years old. In the event the hardware failed, they would lose more money on one hour of credit card processing being down than simply replacing the hardware with a modern ASA.
Production fileservers were well beyond any kind of support agreement. They probably had $1M of intellectual property sitting on them (in that if the data became corrupted that's how much they would be spending to recreate it.)
We won't even get into things like PCI compliance.
I interviewed for what otherwise would have been an awesome job. While viewing the data center they built onsite (this was a "campus" style environment), I was horrified. Sitting in the racks were Cisco networking equipment I didn't recognize, or at least knew as soon as I saw it that the model numbers were ancient. The servers appeared well beyond the end of life, but I couldn't tell at first glance. Digging deeper I found NT 4.0 still running in a production environment. A lot of the core equipment was 14 - 15 years old with probably the median age of the servers being about 8 or 9 years old.
I presented them with a plan and budget to replace it all. At a minimum, doing all implementation in house and being frugal, I got it down to $500k over three years. The CEO didn't think it was necessary despite some detailed but non-technical explanations. I promptly turned the job down. Since then they've burned through 3 IT directors, each frustrated with supporting crap and getting no capex.
Anyone who's invested in YHOO in the past decade deserves to lose money for believing the company has any relevance left. I understand being hopeful about a CEO, but when it involves changing the underlying business model you should run away from the stock as fast as you can.
There is no gamechanger here for this stock. The fact that it's still valued at $32 per share is reason enough to sell this stock and get the hell away from it.
There's a fundamental difference in trust between the two industries.
Technology companies place little trust in users. Good software requires thinking of all of the dumb things a user could do to break it. Good hardware requires thinking of all the dumb things a user could do to break it. Good technology infrastructure requires identifying lots of critical paths and either automating, simplifying or building redundancies because failure will happen.
Car companies are the opposite. Sure, they engineer their product as best as they can, but really we're not talking about an industry that thinks radically different than it did 70 years ago. The user is expected and required to make lots of decisions about using the product an given lots of options for customization.
Having said that, I think a piecemeal approach could work. If you can get the car to drive autonomously on the Interstate that would be huge. I don't think it's realistic to expect a driver to remain attentive enough to grab the wheel in a split second though.
When I first went to college in 1993 I was fairly inexperienced on computers. I'd had a Commodore 128 and spent hours upon hours keying in programs from Ahoy magazine, but later in high school never really worked on a PC or a Mac. So when I got to college and was thrust into needing to use the computer labs, I quickly got frustrated by having to wait in line to use a computer.
I quickly noticed that these engineering workstations in the corners were almost never used - these were the SunOS days and most of them were Sparc 5's, 10's and the rarer 20's. I quickly started using those and fell in love with Unix and how it worked. The commandline seemed really natural. After that when I needed to use a Mac or PC it just seemed to suck.
So, fast forward to late 1994 or early 95. My first Pentium 75MHz PC I put together needed Linux, so I downloaded Slackware to floppy and off I went.
There's no way LL can get the name recognition he needs to raise the funds to be loud enough to get his message out. That's a shame in our society and one of the problems hopefully he could fix.
A better option would be to approach Bernie Sanders and ask to be his VP. They could run the same campaign and the same platform. As VP a majority of LL's time could go to implementing the changes needed once elected. A president simply does not have the time to focus 100% of their time on "fixing things". And honestly, given the framework of the constitution, I have no idea how you could ever do such a thing without the legislature helping - there's no way that would happen right now.
The only way to really make these changes is to get amendments added to the constitution and do that via a direct vote of the states/people - something that's never been done before. Things like campaign finance reform, procedural rules in congress, lobbying/lobbyists, voting, and gerrymandering pretty much all need to be addressed. To get it done, everyone needs to drop the labels of liberal, socialist, libertarian, and conservative. It takes elements of all of those overrated vague concepts to get it done.
Lastly, the candidate that wins this election will spend over $1 billion. The 2016 election will very much be bought. If Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg and George Soros all got together they could purchase this election.
It's a long two parter, but well worth the read. If you want the tl;dr part, skip to part 2 and search for "Robotica". With that in mind, we're going to end up with a planet of mile-high stacks of Magic: The Gathering cards.
So there's a small subset of IT managers out there who get stuck with lousy budgets. I do a bunch of consulting and get into different businesses and some managers play a game:
Step 1: ask for a bunch of money as a capex expense to migrate servers. Let that request get denied.
Step 2: do it again the next year. Let it get denied again.
Step 3: wait until it's absolutely critical - show management articles on the pending doom that will happen - request a lot more money.
Step: Use all the extra money on all the extra IT projects they can't otherwise get approved easily.
I saw a large site that had a lot of XP workstations and the IT manager didn't push too hard to get Windows 7 licensing. Right before XP went out of maintenance he got a large expense approved to not only upgrade to Windows 7 but to actually replace all of the workstations. I saw the same thing with Windows 2000 and a company using that as an excuse to get into virtualization and purchase all that hardware.
So you've recently taken a foray into politics with the formation of the Internet Party. What are your thoughts about what's needed to actually improve New Zealand politics? One of the stated goals of the Internet Party is to review the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, which has recently become a hot topic in the US as well. What are your thoughts on the TPP?
Slashdot Mirror
So, I just want to chime in here on the poster - Phillip Greenspun. Most of you won't remember it, but for those of building out web pages back in 1993, there wasn't exactly a lot of content. Phillip had a ton of pictures online and an online gallery before that was even a thing. Jerry Yang was still updating his content list of Internet by hand. I feel like back then the web was small enough that you really could see nearly everything of interest. Anyway, that was just a name I hadn't seen in a long time.
Most of the time when I read a machine learning or AI story it seems fairly benign and reasonable. Other times I feel a pit form in the bottom of my stomach and wonder how close to the tipping point we our to creating our robot overlords.
Oh. You educated me. Clearly I was ignorant. Sorry about that.. I'd edit my comment if I could.
Can we all just take a minute to sit back and remind ourselves this is not normal. Besides the fact it makes no sense to have bombers on standby when we have plenty of missiles that'll do the job faster and easier, this is just one more bizarre thing that seems to be bending to the will of a crackpot president. I hope if he decides to use nukes that Tillerson and Mattis are in the room to beat the living shit out of him before anyone hears the order.
I think this story is a bit overblown and sensationalized. I think it was exactly the kind of candid responses people like. In nearly everyone one of those cases he followed up with very technical details of why things were designed the way they were. And to be fair, it was held on /r/space as opposed to /r/spacex and the /r/spacex community sort of invaded the AMA and posted the real technical questions. The nice thing there being a much higher level of technical questions were asked, but it did serve to alienate a lot of the /r/space community who probably isn't used to hearing about deep throttling ratios of methalox engines, etc.
Yup. I have a few sites using iDrive in production as the primary cloud backup. I haven't done an extensive recovery operation yet, but I have done the usual recover of misc docs. Works great, simple to configure, lots of great options available.
Their blog doesn't have a link for comments of any kind. This update is truly horrid. Go fuck yourself, Google. I like compact screen layouts so I don't have to scroll.
Something doesn't seem right here. I live in Summit County, CO for 7 years and no one who lives in Summit County is actually from Summit County, or really even Colorado. Furthermore, even fewer are even year round residents. There's almost no one over the 65 there, the vast majority of the population are younger to early middle age ski bums. The same goes for Eagle County and to some degree Pitkin. Something about the ski bum population is skewing those results. (On a side note, a former Air Force general, Don Kutyna, who ran the US Space Command for a bit skied nearly every day and he was 70+ at the time. Over at Copper Mountain we had Frank Walters who was 80+ and skied hundreds of days a year.)
Yeah, I had to do something like that last year. Campus environment, the wifi was off a Ubiquiti controller two firewalls upstream, and the wired network was a mess because of PCI compliance. It took nearly two days to make a single Sonos system work because a whole network edge had to be rearchitected with a slow man in a boat ferrying packets across the river Styx. The next time I had to do it, I just slammed in a rogue wifi router.
I'm so sick of businesses buying Sonos and expecting them to magically work. Oh, yeah, awesome in your house when you don't have multicasting turned off and aren't worried about crossing VLAN's. Maybe John can spend his time figuring out how to just put an option for a static IP on the damn things.
Here: https://www.cnet.com/au/produc... I didn't even bother searching - that was the first Google review I looked at. That system had a 160GB hard drive with a minor upgrade to 250GB. I've been getting 128GB SSD drives in laptops for the past few years, but they almost never work any more in any of my clients businesses. The biggest thing driving it is Dropbox, Google Drive and box.com usage. So many companies (or departments) are ditching fileservers and moving to those systems and they think that the storage just magically lives elsewhere. Instead, you end up with 30GB of cloud storage saved locally on every device.
I'm getting so sick of laptop manufacturers, in particular Dell, offering specs from 2010. You should just be shot if you ship a laptop with 4GB of RAM. Start at 8. No hard drive should be smaller than 200GB. Don't even think of putting anything less than an i5 in an XPS or Latitude line.
I'd love to see Facebook buy Snopes and then integrate that into their news feed. Then they can add a Bullshit Meter to each story. The thing is, the best alt-right news isn't 100% fake; the best ones are about 90% true. It's when they completely manipulate information to present a twisted argument of when it all goes wrong.
When companies don't value their IT assets and understand the importance of having "insurance policies" on their digital IP, it's probably not a place to work. This was clearly in the insanity realm. They had dual PIX firewalls set up in some kind of redundant mode. Good stuff. Except there was no way to get a Cisco (or any other) Smartnet contract on it. They had lost the enable password years before and no one understood exactly how the failover actually worked or the details of the settings on it. They were 14 years old. In the event the hardware failed, they would lose more money on one hour of credit card processing being down than simply replacing the hardware with a modern ASA. Production fileservers were well beyond any kind of support agreement. They probably had $1M of intellectual property sitting on them (in that if the data became corrupted that's how much they would be spending to recreate it.) We won't even get into things like PCI compliance.
I interviewed for what otherwise would have been an awesome job. While viewing the data center they built onsite (this was a "campus" style environment), I was horrified. Sitting in the racks were Cisco networking equipment I didn't recognize, or at least knew as soon as I saw it that the model numbers were ancient. The servers appeared well beyond the end of life, but I couldn't tell at first glance. Digging deeper I found NT 4.0 still running in a production environment. A lot of the core equipment was 14 - 15 years old with probably the median age of the servers being about 8 or 9 years old. I presented them with a plan and budget to replace it all. At a minimum, doing all implementation in house and being frugal, I got it down to $500k over three years. The CEO didn't think it was necessary despite some detailed but non-technical explanations. I promptly turned the job down. Since then they've burned through 3 IT directors, each frustrated with supporting crap and getting no capex.
Anyone who's invested in YHOO in the past decade deserves to lose money for believing the company has any relevance left. I understand being hopeful about a CEO, but when it involves changing the underlying business model you should run away from the stock as fast as you can. There is no gamechanger here for this stock. The fact that it's still valued at $32 per share is reason enough to sell this stock and get the hell away from it.
There's a fundamental difference in trust between the two industries. Technology companies place little trust in users. Good software requires thinking of all of the dumb things a user could do to break it. Good hardware requires thinking of all the dumb things a user could do to break it. Good technology infrastructure requires identifying lots of critical paths and either automating, simplifying or building redundancies because failure will happen. Car companies are the opposite. Sure, they engineer their product as best as they can, but really we're not talking about an industry that thinks radically different than it did 70 years ago. The user is expected and required to make lots of decisions about using the product an given lots of options for customization. Having said that, I think a piecemeal approach could work. If you can get the car to drive autonomously on the Interstate that would be huge. I don't think it's realistic to expect a driver to remain attentive enough to grab the wheel in a split second though.
And here I thought NTP was an overly complicated way of keeping time. Just because you can engineer something complicated doesn't mean you should.
Firing a bullet out of a gun at someone seems so much safer now.
When I first went to college in 1993 I was fairly inexperienced on computers. I'd had a Commodore 128 and spent hours upon hours keying in programs from Ahoy magazine, but later in high school never really worked on a PC or a Mac. So when I got to college and was thrust into needing to use the computer labs, I quickly got frustrated by having to wait in line to use a computer.
I quickly noticed that these engineering workstations in the corners were almost never used - these were the SunOS days and most of them were Sparc 5's, 10's and the rarer 20's. I quickly started using those and fell in love with Unix and how it worked. The commandline seemed really natural. After that when I needed to use a Mac or PC it just seemed to suck.
So, fast forward to late 1994 or early 95. My first Pentium 75MHz PC I put together needed Linux, so I downloaded Slackware to floppy and off I went.
There's no way LL can get the name recognition he needs to raise the funds to be loud enough to get his message out. That's a shame in our society and one of the problems hopefully he could fix.
A better option would be to approach Bernie Sanders and ask to be his VP. They could run the same campaign and the same platform. As VP a majority of LL's time could go to implementing the changes needed once elected. A president simply does not have the time to focus 100% of their time on "fixing things". And honestly, given the framework of the constitution, I have no idea how you could ever do such a thing without the legislature helping - there's no way that would happen right now.
The only way to really make these changes is to get amendments added to the constitution and do that via a direct vote of the states/people - something that's never been done before. Things like campaign finance reform, procedural rules in congress, lobbying/lobbyists, voting, and gerrymandering pretty much all need to be addressed. To get it done, everyone needs to drop the labels of liberal, socialist, libertarian, and conservative. It takes elements of all of those overrated vague concepts to get it done.
Lastly, the candidate that wins this election will spend over $1 billion. The 2016 election will very much be bought. If Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg and George Soros all got together they could purchase this election.
So with all the recent fuss over AI and some respectable folks being scared to death of it, I happened to stumble on this great article on waitbutwhy:
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/...
It's a long two parter, but well worth the read. If you want the tl;dr part, skip to part 2 and search for "Robotica". With that in mind, we're going to end up with a planet of mile-high stacks of Magic: The Gathering cards.
So there's a small subset of IT managers out there who get stuck with lousy budgets. I do a bunch of consulting and get into different businesses and some managers play a game:
Step 1: ask for a bunch of money as a capex expense to migrate servers. Let that request get denied.
Step 2: do it again the next year. Let it get denied again.
Step 3: wait until it's absolutely critical - show management articles on the pending doom that will happen - request a lot more money.
Step: Use all the extra money on all the extra IT projects they can't otherwise get approved easily.
I saw a large site that had a lot of XP workstations and the IT manager didn't push too hard to get Windows 7 licensing. Right before XP went out of maintenance he got a large expense approved to not only upgrade to Windows 7 but to actually replace all of the workstations. I saw the same thing with Windows 2000 and a company using that as an excuse to get into virtualization and purchase all that hardware.
So you've recently taken a foray into politics with the formation of the Internet Party. What are your thoughts about what's needed to actually improve New Zealand politics? One of the stated goals of the Internet Party is to review the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, which has recently become a hot topic in the US as well. What are your thoughts on the TPP?