Yep, Virtualize all the things was the mantra ten years ago, and still applies well today. Get everyone smart on using vagrant and VirtualBox (better yet VMware or even libvirt-kvm if you can get them to run Linux on the bare metal), and start imaging all of those legacy servers in your sandbox VMs. Build a cluster of VM servers to migrate to. Set up load balancers and test failover and rollback deploys. Set up Jenkins or Rundeck to do and log all of the actual work, and a peer review system for checkins from Github. Implement change management on a ticketing system such as Redmine or get them to pay for Jira. Set up a kanban board in Trello or Jira and coordinate everyone via HipChat or Hangouts or Skype, preferably all three. Plus the Lync people, you'll need a separate Jabberd deployment to tie those people in. Set up a monitoring system like Icinga2 and write alert plugins to HipChat and PagerDuty. That will help with backend alerts, but you'll want frontend user flow testing too so sign up for AlertSite and train your UAT people to code up their flows in the Firefox plugin. The tests will put a lot of load on your systems, though, so invest in some application performance monitoring on your toolchain like NewRelic or AppDynamics to help identify where your performance bottlenecks lie. This is a good time to migrate everything to OpsCode Chef so you can automate all of your unit testing and integration testing to prevent regressions. There are still some gaps in what Chef can accomplish with some expediency, though, so better also set up Ansible to take care of doing the actual work while the test-kitchens are running through the Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery pipeline. Spend a good bit of time automating your CMDB tool too so you can report on all of the discrepancies that get by both Chef and Ansible. At this point Splunk is getting kinda expensive, so have a team build up an ELK stack and deploy to a dozen instances on AWS. Oh, you need a dev environment for that too, since that one time that innocuous checkin broke everything, so make that 2 dozen instances. Graphite would be very useful too, if you had someone dedicated to making dashboards for it. But someone else threw up a Dasher page over a weekend and that displayed enough of a high-level view on the workplace monitor to make the execs happy without troubling them with the actual details of things that were broken. That person got promoted and then left the company, but the dashboard page still looks good and green, so we'll leave it running for now. Except at some point a RabbitMQ feeding the ELK stack used by the Dasher page somewhere choked on something being fed to the the log pipeline by carrotd, so you better go digging for that somewhere, since the execs have a demo coming up this week and they'd really like to show that display to depict what an up-to-the-minute decision-making capability they have, but they don't want to show the Icinga2 monitor because there's too much red and amber junk on it from transient test systems that can't use the test Icinga2 instance for some weird networking issue. That could be addressed by migrating your dev environments to docker containers so everything can run within the same VM host, then figure out whether you want to orchestrate them using CoreOS or Kubernetes or swarm or fleet along with the appropriate OpenFlow network definitions, but this isn't authorized to deploy the same way to production yet, so just hang tight for now, OK? Around this time, you should be ready to tackle the migration of your services to systemd.
Well, what would be an improvement upon this? It's probably still better than talking to the kids' parents.
Maybe if instead of an AI, it went to a mechanical turk made of actual unemployed teacher/prostitutes, like the ractives in Diamond Age. Sounds like we need to hack that server.
Or better yet, maybe it goes to a cabbage patch doll that the parents have, and an AI just mediates and filters the parent-child conversation so they don't say anything stupid to each other.
Oh, I guess goo.gl is probably sanitizing the escape sequence to %2500 , bit.ly does the same thing.
tinyurl.com does not... however it does appear to try to grab the source URL first, so http://tinyurl.com/qekdsr9 just kinda spins forever.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/qek... leads to another page with a link to http://a/%%30%30 , which will crash Chrome if you bother to scroll down and mouseover it.
As some people have sorta mentioned, the mouseover seems to just crash one tab, but actually manually typing it into the URL bar and hitting enter will crash the entire browser, just after it appears to rewrite it to %00.
curl -vL http://goo.gl/5WtI0B * Ignoring the response-body * Connection #0 to host goo.gl left intact * Issue another request to this URL: 'http://a/%2500' * Could not resolve host: a * Closing connection 1 curl: (6) Could not resolve host: a
But I couldn't get http://a/%2500 to break any of my browsers, so not sure what to do with that.
You could get her a pair of empty frames, just for the bedroom.
The weird thing is... I can suspend my disbelief with all kinds of fake stuff in porn, but for some reason seeing frames without lenses just kill it for me. Yeah, I know lighting glare is a problem. Use polarizing filters or just roll with the (Z)_(Z) look.
This is the very thing that makes the playing field unlevel. There will be some nations, particularly in the West, concerned with restricting and regulating these genome-altering experiments.
Caution will rule the day in many legislations, but there will be exceptions, and because of the ever present arms race, even the cautious nations will be tempted to ignore their own imposed limitations. As always.
Yep, knowledge is power. Science contributes to knowledge.
The danger is when political people without knowledge play their political games to amass wealth and power and following. Unfortunately, they're very good at their games, so they can effectively preserve their own power by discrediting any science or bodies that don't support them.
They provide students access to equipment at school, the op is asking for options for them to be able to work from home. For the most part $50 is going to be the very bottom, but will usually need some things added on to make them really usable, a $50 tablet is going to suck for typing reports without a USB-to-go cable and keyboard.
Something like the Stream 7 tablet at $100 (sometimes less) would be close, but fails the hdmi output they are wanting. Realistically they are looking at $75-$150 to get a decently usable general purpose type of system. The lower end requiring more assembly type of work and technical knowledge.
I think the HP Stream 7 is a very workable device, and often goes on sale for $80 or less. HDMI will become less of an issue with wireless display to SmartTVs (or cheap HDMI dongles that turn regular TVs and projectors to SmartTVs)
Reposting from yesterday's "Best Tablet?" thread:
I'm pretty happy with our HP Stream 7 that we picked up early this year. Win10 on it is fine. Win8.x wasn't as much of a pain as people would lead you to believe. The OSK is still crap, though (even after enabling the hidden full 104-key virtual keyboard), so I threw a bluetooth keyboard and also a nice mouse at it.
Runs Steam fine, much of my 2D game library works well. People have reported success getting it to boot Linux. Its main limitation is the 1GB of RAM which preempts a lot of multitasking, but for that price, you can buy one tablet for each app you want to run and line them up on your desk and walls and laugh maniacally.
The nice thing about the current proliferation of smartphones and tablets is that, unlike old power-hungry PCs, they're still pretty useful after you retire them to a life as a digital photo frame or weather station or garage door opener or baby monitor or dashcam or whatever.
I'm pretty happy with the HP Stream 7, which can be had for $80 or sometimes less. Win10 on it is fine. Win8.x wasn't as much of a pain as people would lead you to believe. The OSK is crap, though (even with the hidden full keyboard), so I threw a bluetooth keyboard and mouse at it.
Runs Steam fine, much of my 2D game library works well. People have reported success getting it to boot Linux. Its main limitation is the 1GB of RAM which limits multitasking, but for that price, you buy one tablet for each app you want to run and line them up on your desk and walls and laugh maniacally.
The nice thing about the proliferation of smartphones and tablet is that, unlike old power-hungry PCs, they're still pretty useful after you retire them to a life as a digital photo frame or weather station or garage door opener or baby monitor or whatever.
Names out West are not like names out in the Old New World, but rather an exquisite form of trolling... even many of the native american names for territories were derogatory references to "those crazy tribes over the hills", like if we officially called places Redneck Forest and ValleyGirl Valley.
Washington State was so named because they originally asked the US Congress to name them Columbia (hey, the Columbia River flows through here, and we're right under British Columbia, and Lady Columbia features prominently on the state flag. But no, Congress was busy forming the District of Columbia from swamp lands generously annexed from Maryland and Virginia at the time, and they didn't want to get confused with a bunch of rowdy Westerners. FINE, the rowdy Westerners responded. We'll pick something ELSE.
That said, it'd be neat to have Mt. Rainier renamed to the native Mt. Tacoma, which means something like "mother of the rivers". But it will never fly because that's one of the things the City of Tacoma tried to do back when they were trying to wrest money and prestige from the City of Seattle back in the railroad prospecting corruption days.
Still cheaper to put a huge golden arches ad in LEO, a hotel in LEO, an Apple iSat in LEO, NSA spy sats in LEO, and Chinese flags in LEO. Still haven't done any of that, except for the military stuff.
There is no military advantage to doing anything on the moon. The only reason the US went there was because they had already lost the rest of the space race to the Russians. One of the ways to win cold wars is to get your opponent to vastly outspend you on their military until their economy collapses. Fortunately for us, the space program does have positive effects on the economy, compared to stockpiling tons of tanks, carriers, and fighter jets that we never use.
If I need to bypass a child filter for a porn site in some hellish future UK dystopia, I'll just go ask a kid.
Heh, anyone remember the great age verification questions on the beginning of the first Leisure Suit Larry? "Which of the following people was the drummer for Queen?" and shit like that.
Yep... but remember trying to teach old folks the concept of the "double-click"? And the pain of trying and failing to keep the pointer steady between the first click and the second click, or else you accidentally flick all your precious icons and folders onto the trash? Yeah.
It's amazing that Android and iOS home screens essentially look the same as the Win3.1 desktop... they just finally got rid of the silly double-click. And suddenly it works for grandmas. Huzzah.
Pretty much this. I sort of like the idea of a start menu, but I admit I prefer using hotkeys to Win-t a terminal or Win-e a file explorer or Win-r and run prompt.
The funny thing is that the iOS and Android home screens work a lot more like the Win3.1 interface. And I have to admit I was pretty lost the first time I loaded an Android emulator without having been introduced to the 'swipe'.
Yep, this. People understand that you were young. Even evil conniving politicians bent on dredging up your ruin. In fact, what I've heard of from the Instagram generation is that they won't trust you as an authentic human being. I wouldn't be surprised if millennial hiring managers would weed out applicants without a sufficiently convincing social media footprint including childhood transgressions. So get cracking, geezers!
I don't know about you, but I kinda prefer having targeted advertising for stuff I'm actually interested in, as opposed to being bombarded with random ads for beer and diapers and feminine hygiene products that I get when I'm in a "fresh" browser or incognito mode. I'm also OK with using the random Google accounts I created to do online shopping... they're anonymous enough for me relative to the realname account that I only use for talking to the handful of actual people in a "social" context.
Yeah, I'm happy enough just closing any tab that starts sprouting unsolicited audio, either from ads or actual content that autoplays. Unfortunately, I doubt most web analytics do a good job showing people leaving their site in droves once some autoplay content starts.
Slashdot might be a good example of this, though... I used to leave/. running in a tab all day long, but now I usually end up closing it after something autoplays nowadays and not going back. Maybe someone noticed, because I do see autoplay junk hit the page slightly less often now.
Facebook oddly enough actually has a pretty nice system where videos autoplay muted as you scroll by them, pause once they're offscreen, unless you unmute or hit play. It would be nice to be able to give better reasons for blocking content, though, like "This link was a useless slideshow" or "The page had some stupid autoplay thing"
How long has linkedin been around? For me, it seems like it finally reached "critical mass" only a year or two ago. After lurking for nearly a decade, I suddenly realized that a bunch of people I knew and worked with were suddenly on it.
Google Plus works well, and I do use it a lot with my close family. I upload most of my photo collections there, and then share the link via Facebook/Twitter/email or whatever. Everyone and their dog is not on there, and that's fine with me.
Everyone complains about Facebook, and it'll just take one or two major slips (be it via more invasive ads, or a data breach, or just one too many pokes) that could drive people in droves over to another social network (or some sort of network-of-networks aggregator, which we're probably overdue for). And GooglePlus will be mature and sitting there waiting.
And then the early adopters will migrate over to the next platform as the signal-to-noise ratio plummets again. No big deal.
Heh, since the Win95 days I used to have to flatten and rebuild my Windows gaming box every 6 months or so due to driver problems and bloat. Then the last time my HDD died I just up and installed one of the pirated/cracked Russian Win7 versions (since my OEM Win7 license was spent on that dead OS disk). It runs in Test mode and doesn't get any updates, but I haven't had any problems for well over a year now of running Steam games. Whoever pwned my system does a much better job keeping it stable and running smoothly:P
Yes, look at software requirements first. FEA and CFD software can be extremely hardware specific. Cant they make use of powerful GPGPUs? Most server chassis will have great CPU/RAM but crap in the way of PCIe slots and especially GPU power plugs. What OS will the SW need to run? HP doesn't even certify "consumer grade" OSes on much of their rackmount lineup, and if you use Windows Server 20XX you often can't get the latest certified GPU drivers on the Server OSes, so you may well lose product support one way or the other. Ask me how I know.
Where are these servers/workstations going to be located? Servers are NOISY and belong in a climate-controlled server room, and then you'll need some sort of remote-access mechanism to them. Depending on latency and distance requirements, that can get pretty expensive.
If these are just headless number cruncher units, by all means absolutely use AWS (they also have some sort of CUDA farm if your software can leverage GPGPU). Then you can scale out the wazoo and pay only for what you need when you use it. Do your development work on your own mini-cluster (could be just a bunch of VMs in a workstation) if you want to keep standing operational costs down, but then farm out all of the big jobs to AWS and automatically shut those VMs down after they're done doing their thing. HPC clusters are a lot of work to design and keep running (something somewhere is always breaking once you get up past a dozen nodes or so). Unless what you're doing is classified, I doubt it's worthwhile getting into operating your own server farm, especially if you don't have one already.
Yeah, they have the portable card readers next door in Canada.
Actually, the chip on my AmEx Blue card is TOO advanced for some vendors. The reader wouldn't take the magstripe because it somehow detected that it was a chip card, so the vendor had me stick it into the contact reader. However, AmEx just upgraded my card to the RFID and got rid of the contact reader a few months ago due to "security reasons". So... my fancy new chip card wouldn't work and I had to pull out my old FCU VISA magstripe backup card instead.
I don't know why the RFID would have less security issues than a contact patch, though, but I'm sure there are decent exploits for each... probably more interesting ones with the proximity radios.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, Virtualize all the things was the mantra ten years ago, and still applies well today. Get everyone smart on using vagrant and VirtualBox (better yet VMware or even libvirt-kvm if you can get them to run Linux on the bare metal), and start imaging all of those legacy servers in your sandbox VMs. Build a cluster of VM servers to migrate to. Set up load balancers and test failover and rollback deploys. Set up Jenkins or Rundeck to do and log all of the actual work, and a peer review system for checkins from Github. Implement change management on a ticketing system such as Redmine or get them to pay for Jira. Set up a kanban board in Trello or Jira and coordinate everyone via HipChat or Hangouts or Skype, preferably all three. Plus the Lync people, you'll need a separate Jabberd deployment to tie those people in. Set up a monitoring system like Icinga2 and write alert plugins to HipChat and PagerDuty. That will help with backend alerts, but you'll want frontend user flow testing too so sign up for AlertSite and train your UAT people to code up their flows in the Firefox plugin. The tests will put a lot of load on your systems, though, so invest in some application performance monitoring on your toolchain like NewRelic or AppDynamics to help identify where your performance bottlenecks lie. This is a good time to migrate everything to OpsCode Chef so you can automate all of your unit testing and integration testing to prevent regressions. There are still some gaps in what Chef can accomplish with some expediency, though, so better also set up Ansible to take care of doing the actual work while the test-kitchens are running through the Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery pipeline. Spend a good bit of time automating your CMDB tool too so you can report on all of the discrepancies that get by both Chef and Ansible. At this point Splunk is getting kinda expensive, so have a team build up an ELK stack and deploy to a dozen instances on AWS. Oh, you need a dev environment for that too, since that one time that innocuous checkin broke everything, so make that 2 dozen instances. Graphite would be very useful too, if you had someone dedicated to making dashboards for it. But someone else threw up a Dasher page over a weekend and that displayed enough of a high-level view on the workplace monitor to make the execs happy without troubling them with the actual details of things that were broken. That person got promoted and then left the company, but the dashboard page still looks good and green, so we'll leave it running for now. Except at some point a RabbitMQ feeding the ELK stack used by the Dasher page somewhere choked on something being fed to the the log pipeline by carrotd, so you better go digging for that somewhere, since the execs have a demo coming up this week and they'd really like to show that display to depict what an up-to-the-minute decision-making capability they have, but they don't want to show the Icinga2 monitor because there's too much red and amber junk on it from transient test systems that can't use the test Icinga2 instance for some weird networking issue. That could be addressed by migrating your dev environments to docker containers so everything can run within the same VM host, then figure out whether you want to orchestrate them using CoreOS or Kubernetes or swarm or fleet along with the appropriate OpenFlow network definitions, but this isn't authorized to deploy the same way to production yet, so just hang tight for now, OK? Around this time, you should be ready to tackle the migration of your services to systemd.
Well, what would be an improvement upon this? It's probably still better than talking to the kids' parents.
Maybe if instead of an AI, it went to a mechanical turk made of actual unemployed teacher/prostitutes, like the ractives in Diamond Age. Sounds like we need to hack that server.
Or better yet, maybe it goes to a cabbage patch doll that the parents have, and an AI just mediates and filters the parent-child conversation so they don't say anything stupid to each other.
Oh, I guess goo.gl is probably sanitizing the escape sequence to %2500 , bit.ly does the same thing.
tinyurl.com does not... however it does appear to try to grab the source URL first, so http://tinyurl.com/qekdsr9 just kinda spins forever.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/qek... leads to another page with a link to http://a/%%30%30 , which will crash Chrome if you bother to scroll down and mouseover it.
As some people have sorta mentioned, the mouseover seems to just crash one tab, but actually manually typing it into the URL bar and hitting enter will crash the entire browser, just after it appears to rewrite it to %00.
It's not broken, it's just dumb.
curl -vL http://goo.gl/5WtI0B
* Ignoring the response-body
* Connection #0 to host goo.gl left intact
* Issue another request to this URL: 'http://a/%2500'
* Could not resolve host: a
* Closing connection 1
curl: (6) Could not resolve host: a
But I couldn't get http://a/%2500 to break any of my browsers, so not sure what to do with that.
You could get her a pair of empty frames, just for the bedroom.
The weird thing is... I can suspend my disbelief with all kinds of fake stuff in porn, but for some reason seeing frames without lenses just kill it for me. Yeah, I know lighting glare is a problem. Use polarizing filters or just roll with the (Z)_(Z) look.
As someone with a glasses fetish, I'm OK with this.
Still bitter that my wife got herself Lasik correction way back when, though. Even moreso that she did it without using pretax HSA dollars.
Re:Great to know that nobody can stand in the way of my US laboratory's work to create a race of mutant tentacle monsters!
Oh no! Better legislate NOW to nip it in the bud!
http://oglaf.com/ladder1/
http://oglaf.com/ladder1/2/
This is the very thing that makes the playing field unlevel. There will be some nations, particularly in the West, concerned with restricting and regulating these genome-altering experiments.
Caution will rule the day in many legislations, but there will be exceptions, and because of the ever present arms race, even the cautious nations will be tempted to ignore their own imposed limitations. As always.
Yep, knowledge is power. Science contributes to knowledge.
The danger is when political people without knowledge play their political games to amass wealth and power and following. Unfortunately, they're very good at their games, so they can effectively preserve their own power by discrediting any science or bodies that don't support them.
Eh, I'll take technological solutions over political solution any day. At least that way I have some control.
They provide students access to equipment at school, the op is asking for options for them to be able to work from home. For the most part $50 is going to be the very bottom, but will usually need some things added on to make them really usable, a $50 tablet is going to suck for typing reports without a USB-to-go cable and keyboard.
Something like the Stream 7 tablet at $100 (sometimes less) would be close, but fails the hdmi output they are wanting. Realistically they are looking at $75-$150 to get a decently usable general purpose type of system. The lower end requiring more assembly type of work and technical knowledge.
I think the HP Stream 7 is a very workable device, and often goes on sale for $80 or less. HDMI will become less of an issue with wireless display to SmartTVs (or cheap HDMI dongles that turn regular TVs and projectors to SmartTVs)
Reposting from yesterday's "Best Tablet?" thread:
I'm pretty happy with our HP Stream 7 that we picked up early this year. Win10 on it is fine. Win8.x wasn't as much of a pain as people would lead you to believe. The OSK is still crap, though (even after enabling the hidden full 104-key virtual keyboard), so I threw a bluetooth keyboard and also a nice mouse at it.
$20 BT keyboard http://www.amazon.com/Jelly-Co...
$30 BT mouse http://www.amazon.com/Microsof...
Runs Steam fine, much of my 2D game library works well. People have reported success getting it to boot Linux. Its main limitation is the 1GB of RAM which preempts a lot of multitasking, but for that price, you can buy one tablet for each app you want to run and line them up on your desk and walls and laugh maniacally.
The nice thing about the current proliferation of smartphones and tablets is that, unlike old power-hungry PCs, they're still pretty useful after you retire them to a life as a digital photo frame or weather station or garage door opener or baby monitor or dashcam or whatever.
I'm pretty happy with the HP Stream 7, which can be had for $80 or sometimes less. Win10 on it is fine. Win8.x wasn't as much of a pain as people would lead you to believe. The OSK is crap, though (even with the hidden full keyboard), so I threw a bluetooth keyboard and mouse at it.
http://www.amazon.com/Jelly-Co...
http://www.amazon.com/Microsof...
Runs Steam fine, much of my 2D game library works well. People have reported success getting it to boot Linux. Its main limitation is the 1GB of RAM which limits multitasking, but for that price, you buy one tablet for each app you want to run and line them up on your desk and walls and laugh maniacally.
The nice thing about the proliferation of smartphones and tablet is that, unlike old power-hungry PCs, they're still pretty useful after you retire them to a life as a digital photo frame or weather station or garage door opener or baby monitor or whatever.
Names out West are not like names out in the Old New World, but rather an exquisite form of trolling... even many of the native american names for territories were derogatory references to "those crazy tribes over the hills", like if we officially called places Redneck Forest and ValleyGirl Valley.
Washington State was so named because they originally asked the US Congress to name them Columbia (hey, the Columbia River flows through here, and we're right under British Columbia, and Lady Columbia features prominently on the state flag. But no, Congress was busy forming the District of Columbia from swamp lands generously annexed from Maryland and Virginia at the time, and they didn't want to get confused with a bunch of rowdy Westerners. FINE, the rowdy Westerners responded. We'll pick something ELSE.
That said, it'd be neat to have Mt. Rainier renamed to the native Mt. Tacoma, which means something like "mother of the rivers". But it will never fly because that's one of the things the City of Tacoma tried to do back when they were trying to wrest money and prestige from the City of Seattle back in the railroad prospecting corruption days.
Still cheaper to put a huge golden arches ad in LEO, a hotel in LEO, an Apple iSat in LEO, NSA spy sats in LEO, and Chinese flags in LEO. Still haven't done any of that, except for the military stuff.
There is no military advantage to doing anything on the moon. The only reason the US went there was because they had already lost the rest of the space race to the Russians. One of the ways to win cold wars is to get your opponent to vastly outspend you on their military until their economy collapses. Fortunately for us, the space program does have positive effects on the economy, compared to stockpiling tons of tanks, carriers, and fighter jets that we never use.
I'm not gonna remember a number like that!
If I need to bypass a child filter for a porn site in some hellish future UK dystopia, I'll just go ask a kid.
Heh, anyone remember the great age verification questions on the beginning of the first Leisure Suit Larry?
"Which of the following people was the drummer for Queen?" and shit like that.
Heh, I ran Picasa's face recognition on my pr0n dir, and the results were pretty awesome.
Also most of the Czech models apparently have indistinguishable facial structure.
Yep... but remember trying to teach old folks the concept of the "double-click"? And the pain of trying and failing to keep the pointer steady between the first click and the second click, or else you accidentally flick all your precious icons and folders onto the trash? Yeah.
It's amazing that Android and iOS home screens essentially look the same as the Win3.1 desktop... they just finally got rid of the silly double-click. And suddenly it works for grandmas. Huzzah.
Pretty much this. I sort of like the idea of a start menu, but I admit I prefer using hotkeys to Win-t a terminal or Win-e a file explorer or Win-r and run prompt.
The funny thing is that the iOS and Android home screens work a lot more like the Win3.1 interface. And I have to admit I was pretty lost the first time I loaded an Android emulator without having been introduced to the 'swipe'.
/ former Boeing engineer
Yep, this. People understand that you were young. Even evil conniving politicians bent on dredging up your ruin. In fact, what I've heard of from the Instagram generation is that they won't trust you as an authentic human being. I wouldn't be surprised if millennial hiring managers would weed out applicants without a sufficiently convincing social media footprint including childhood transgressions. So get cracking, geezers!
I don't know about you, but I kinda prefer having targeted advertising for stuff I'm actually interested in, as opposed to being bombarded with random ads for beer and diapers and feminine hygiene products that I get when I'm in a "fresh" browser or incognito mode. I'm also OK with using the random Google accounts I created to do online shopping... they're anonymous enough for me relative to the realname account that I only use for talking to the handful of actual people in a "social" context.
Yeah, I'm happy enough just closing any tab that starts sprouting unsolicited audio, either from ads or actual content that autoplays. Unfortunately, I doubt most web analytics do a good job showing people leaving their site in droves once some autoplay content starts.
Slashdot might be a good example of this, though... I used to leave /. running in a tab all day long, but now I usually end up closing it after something autoplays nowadays and not going back. Maybe someone noticed, because I do see autoplay junk hit the page slightly less often now.
Facebook oddly enough actually has a pretty nice system where videos autoplay muted as you scroll by them, pause once they're offscreen, unless you unmute or hit play. It would be nice to be able to give better reasons for blocking content, though, like "This link was a useless slideshow" or "The page had some stupid autoplay thing"
I was about to ask where the receptors were located, then found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... was a mistranslation debunked in the 70s :/
Yep, this.
How long has linkedin been around? For me, it seems like it finally reached "critical mass" only a year or two ago. After lurking for nearly a decade, I suddenly realized that a bunch of people I knew and worked with were suddenly on it.
Google Plus works well, and I do use it a lot with my close family. I upload most of my photo collections there, and then share the link via Facebook/Twitter/email or whatever. Everyone and their dog is not on there, and that's fine with me.
Everyone complains about Facebook, and it'll just take one or two major slips (be it via more invasive ads, or a data breach, or just one too many pokes) that could drive people in droves over to another social network (or some sort of network-of-networks aggregator, which we're probably overdue for). And GooglePlus will be mature and sitting there waiting.
And then the early adopters will migrate over to the next platform as the signal-to-noise ratio plummets again. No big deal.
Heh, since the Win95 days I used to have to flatten and rebuild my Windows gaming box every 6 months or so due to driver problems and bloat. Then the last time my HDD died I just up and installed one of the pirated/cracked Russian Win7 versions (since my OEM Win7 license was spent on that dead OS disk). It runs in Test mode and doesn't get any updates, but I haven't had any problems for well over a year now of running Steam games. Whoever pwned my system does a much better job keeping it stable and running smoothly :P
Yes, look at software requirements first. FEA and CFD software can be extremely hardware specific. Cant they make use of powerful GPGPUs? Most server chassis will have great CPU/RAM but crap in the way of PCIe slots and especially GPU power plugs. What OS will the SW need to run? HP doesn't even certify "consumer grade" OSes on much of their rackmount lineup, and if you use Windows Server 20XX you often can't get the latest certified GPU drivers on the Server OSes, so you may well lose product support one way or the other. Ask me how I know.
Where are these servers/workstations going to be located? Servers are NOISY and belong in a climate-controlled server room, and then you'll need some sort of remote-access mechanism to them. Depending on latency and distance requirements, that can get pretty expensive.
If these are just headless number cruncher units, by all means absolutely use AWS (they also have some sort of CUDA farm if your software can leverage GPGPU). Then you can scale out the wazoo and pay only for what you need when you use it. Do your development work on your own mini-cluster (could be just a bunch of VMs in a workstation) if you want to keep standing operational costs down, but then farm out all of the big jobs to AWS and automatically shut those VMs down after they're done doing their thing. HPC clusters are a lot of work to design and keep running (something somewhere is always breaking once you get up past a dozen nodes or so). Unless what you're doing is classified, I doubt it's worthwhile getting into operating your own server farm, especially if you don't have one already.
Yeah, they have the portable card readers next door in Canada.
Actually, the chip on my AmEx Blue card is TOO advanced for some vendors. The reader wouldn't take the magstripe because it somehow detected that it was a chip card, so the vendor had me stick it into the contact reader. However, AmEx just upgraded my card to the RFID and got rid of the contact reader a few months ago due to "security reasons". So... my fancy new chip card wouldn't work and I had to pull out my old FCU VISA magstripe backup card instead.
I don't know why the RFID would have less security issues than a contact patch, though, but I'm sure there are decent exploits for each... probably more interesting ones with the proximity radios.