While it's true that having crap running in the background will slow down any OS, it's only Windows that is generally plagued with things like this... Most Linux applications install and update through the package manager so they don't need their own background updater process running. And for the few things that do need to perform background actions, they generally hook into the crontab rather than running their own persistent process.
Linux also tends to keep applications and their configuration separate, whereas Windows has a centralised registry, which results in application configurations being loaded into memory and processed even when those applications are not being used.
Similarly Windows relies on individual applications to provide their own uninstall process while Linux handles that consistently and thoroughly through the package manager, Windows uninstallers often fail to fully remove files and registry entries, leaving behind cruft which accumulates over time.
Something like raytracing is unlikely to be affected so much, as it's CPU bound and Windows tends to choke the IO systems (hence why someone suggested an SSD)... Plus you're probably not using your render farm hosts for anything else so far less cruft is accumulating on them.
Plus Windows is a far more complex system than Unix, it's almost impossible to understand inside out what's actually going on... The less you understand the system, the less you can keep it under control.
So yes, much of the slowdown is the fault of windows, which is why although such problems could technically plague other systems they generally don't.
But not hard to connect your phone to a charger while you drive, most cars have accessory sockets these days or even direct USB connectors for charging phones.
There is no such thing as "a certain audience".. If you operate a movie theatre, you can't check passports on the door and only allow citizens of a specific country to enter. You can't stop someone sending physical media across borders, although the north koreans keep trying.
Refusing to sell content to someone based on their location or nationality should be illegal as it's discrimination. Similarly, trying to carve the world up into arbitrary areas so you can enforce exclusive distributors in each area is anti-competitive and should also be illegal.
If you want to charge someone to view your content, then you should do so in a non discriminatory way - ie anyone can view it and for the same price (external factors like taxes, shipping costs notwithstanding). Anything else should be illegal.
The other difference in many countries is that you aren't protected by employment laws which make it very difficult to get rid of employees... You contract can be terminated at any time, whereas firing an employee requires that they've done something seriously wrong.
If you want to pay someone 100k to work 50 hours, then specify 50 hours in the contract... If your contracted for 40 hours and you work 60 then you're skewing the stats and making it difficult for the company to keep track of hours budgeted for a given task. If the company needs more man-hours to do a given task than they have paid for, then they really need to either be employing more staff or improving the efficiency of those they already have. Having staff work longer hours results in diminishing returns as people get tired and angry, even 40 hours is too long for many jobs and just results in people taking many breaks during the day.
What's the reasoning behind not paying overtime for someone on more than 80k? Are you assuming that they won't do any overtime, or are you expecting them to work extra hours for free? I would always avoid any contract where the hours were not specified up front... If the company can arbitrarily demand that you work extra hours then it makes it difficult to have any kind of social life. You can't exactly make plans when you could be forced to cancel them and work instead.
Overtime should always be both optional and compensated... I certainly wouldn't want to give up my weekends and evenings for free, nor would i want to cancel important personal plans for work (this would likely result in divorce). Not to mention that if your time becomes a free resource to the company, then they have an incentive to take as much of it as they can especially when you have incompetent management who treat their staff as machines - more uptime = more work.
Very true, but employers are often greedy and treat their employees like robots... Most people's optimal concentration span is relatively short, so anything that isn't ridiculously mundane can only be done efficiently for a few hours and regular breaks are needed... Even mundane work that doesn't require much thought will suffer from longer hours, as people will get tired and make more mistakes. And ofcourse overworked, unhappy resentful employees won't expend any more than minimum effort.
I've seen many employers institute highly unpopular policies in an aim to increase output, only for it to have the opposite effect. Ofcourse then they blame the staff and never even consider that their own policies were the cause.
Only, they should have started working on it slowly one department at a time a few years ago... They will probably end up finishing the migration to something else just before that too becomes unsupported and they're back in the same boat.
Spammers will find other ways to host their sites, like compromised boxes... Also even if you pull boxes and domains after abuse complaints have been made, its usually too late because any victims have already fallen for the spam.
A cheap VPS plus a domain name would also be more than adequate for hosting your own email, or even a low power ARM based machine running at home on the end of your DSL assuming you have a static ip and an ISP that doesn't filter SMTP traffic.
As for spam filtering, a filter that's dedicted to you will usually be more effective too as it can learn about the email *You* typically receive... A lot of spam is sent around in languages like russian and chinese, but if you can't read these languages then chances are you will never receive any legitimate email written in these languages... A major email provider cannot block entire languages because they might have customers who speak those languages, but a mail server dedicated to one person can easily and reasonably do so.
Security is expensive, hardware is cheap. You can buy from vendors who are used to dealing with clients holding confidential data, and expect them to handle returns or swallow the cost of replacements without returning the dead ones. It all depends on the contract between you and the supplier.
Or you can simply not return faulty drives, just replace them and then destroy the faulty ones. Many places will stress test the drives for a while before putting live data on them, most drives that will fail during their useful lifespan will do so early on and can be returned at this point because they don't have any worthwhile data on them yet. Drives that fail after a few years are worthless anyway, and will just be replaced with newer higher capacity drives.
The overhead of encryption means inferior performance, higher cpu utilisation, overhead of key management, cost of dedicated crypto hardware etc... This will often outweigh the cost of a couple of extra drives should some fail.
The problem is you can't always be the one to dictate the contract terms, and quite often someone utterly incompetent will have come up with the terms... There are organisations which are burdened with the requirement to encrypt *ALL* disks, even those on servers because someone writing the contract heard the encryption buzzword, or got a kickback from a company selling a disk encryption product.
When the contract stipulates that something must be done, even if that something is stupid then it's very easy to justify the expense and negative side effects of doing so. If something is not stipulated, it can be quite difficult to justify, even if there are significant benefits it can be hard to explain these to people with a poor understanding. Many don't care and are purely concerned with complying with the given spec, while others will assume that whoever wrote the spec knows more than you do and that the spec is gospel and cannot be wrong.
Some banks already sign their mails, albeit with s/mime instead of pgp... PGP requires a plugin for most mail clients, while s/mime is usually supported by default. I work in security, and always sign my emails... The majority of our clients simply ignore the signature and have no idea what it is.
While we know that Apple were talking to Sony about 4k content, we don't know who else Apple were talking to about the same thing... It was Sony who leaked rather than Apple.
And there's nothing stopping them continuing selling the same plans at the same price, they just have to be honest and tell their customers that they aren't unlimited.
While these claims are probably ridiculous and with no merit, don't underestimate the speed at which medical research can progress under a regime which doesn't have morals holding the researchers back... The nazis made significant progress.
You should teach general concepts that can be applied to any tools... If you teach the tools that are currently in use then chances are they will have been superseded by the time people leave education and enter the industry anyway. Even if the same tools are around, they will likely be much newer versions and could have significant changes that made your experience of the previous versions largely useless.
We learned wordperfect for dos in school, but i've never worked anywhere which used any version of wordperfect.
If your booting from the SSD, chances are the machine will crash... Would be much better to just stay in readonly mode, and give you the chance to copy data off (and yes im aware this is no substitute for a backup, but think of the use case of a travelling laptop far away from its backup server etc).
The Linux kernel will run on a 486 and upwards, i believe they dropped 386 because it was extremely crufty... It also still runs on m68k as far as i know, all the way back to mc68020 (i even have an m68k box to hand running a fairly modern kernel but its a 68060).
Mainstream distros compile to require modern hardware by default because it makes sense to do so, not making use of such features results in inferior performance when running on newer hardware, thats why many people use distros like gentoo where you can compile everything with support for your actual cpu.
There's nothing stopping you from compiling binaries to support older cpus, and there are distros out there which support them but that's no reason to hold everyone else back for the very few niche users who might want to run linux on a 486...
I'm also not sure why you'd want to run gcc3 on a 15 year old piece of hardware, you could always cross compile on new hardware and doing so is going to be MUCH faster.
Or just make your environment portable enough to run on anything vaguely unix-like... Linux, *BSD, Solaris etc will still compile and run extremely old code without problems. There are plenty of old programs out there which still compile and run on current systems without problems. I have code which predates linux, and predates any 64bit hardware yet still compiles and runs (very quickly) on a modern amd64 linux host.
The only difference here is that the critical infrastructure is custom designed... There are MANY cases where a piece of ageing critical infrastructure is actually a black box purchased from a vendor who are long since out of business, which is actually a much worse situation than these guys are in.
The Amiga may be a proprietary system, but it's also one that is well understood and has been well documented over the years. Several people who worked on development of the Amiga hardware are still active online (e.g. Dave Haynie). The custom control system sitting on top of it belongs entirely to these guys, they have the source code and still have access to the original developer. Similarly, Amiga hardware is common enough that spares are easily available, and there are also a number of places which specialise in repairing Amiga hardware to extend its lifespan.
They could get the original developer to port the system to a new platform (although any platform current today will be just as obsolete as the amiga in 20 years and might not be as prevalent).
Amiga hardware is anything but cheap these days, at least the higher end 2000/3000/4000 models. Most of them also suffer from a few known problems (leaking clock batteries, blown capacitors). I still have a couple of amigas in the garage, and they would fetch more on the used market than any of the much newer hardware i have.
That's why people of this generation are so much better at IT than younger people... Those who started out on C64s and similar systems got to learn the system inside out, and were encouraged to do so.
Modern computers do the exact opposite, they actively discourage kids from learning about them and instil fear to prevent them from trying anything. Systems which are too fragile and easy to break at a software level, filled with scary warnings. Kids learn by trying things and breaking stuff, and all these scary warnings will put them off. We now have a generation of people who are afraid to do anything outside of the limited sandbox, and it shows.
And how exactly would it do that? There are CAs in most of the countries where such agencies are based, as well as plenty of others that could potentially have been compromised... Your browser will trust any one of hundreds when connecting to an SSL site.
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While it's true that having crap running in the background will slow down any OS, it's only Windows that is generally plagued with things like this... Most Linux applications install and update through the package manager so they don't need their own background updater process running. And for the few things that do need to perform background actions, they generally hook into the crontab rather than running their own persistent process.
Linux also tends to keep applications and their configuration separate, whereas Windows has a centralised registry, which results in application configurations being loaded into memory and processed even when those applications are not being used.
Similarly Windows relies on individual applications to provide their own uninstall process while Linux handles that consistently and thoroughly through the package manager, Windows uninstallers often fail to fully remove files and registry entries, leaving behind cruft which accumulates over time.
Something like raytracing is unlikely to be affected so much, as it's CPU bound and Windows tends to choke the IO systems (hence why someone suggested an SSD)... Plus you're probably not using your render farm hosts for anything else so far less cruft is accumulating on them.
Plus Windows is a far more complex system than Unix, it's almost impossible to understand inside out what's actually going on... The less you understand the system, the less you can keep it under control.
So yes, much of the slowdown is the fault of windows, which is why although such problems could technically plague other systems they generally don't.
But not hard to connect your phone to a charger while you drive, most cars have accessory sockets these days or even direct USB connectors for charging phones.
There is no such thing as "a certain audience"..
If you operate a movie theatre, you can't check passports on the door and only allow citizens of a specific country to enter.
You can't stop someone sending physical media across borders, although the north koreans keep trying.
Refusing to sell content to someone based on their location or nationality should be illegal as it's discrimination. Similarly, trying to carve the world up into arbitrary areas so you can enforce exclusive distributors in each area is anti-competitive and should also be illegal.
If you want to charge someone to view your content, then you should do so in a non discriminatory way - ie anyone can view it and for the same price (external factors like taxes, shipping costs notwithstanding). Anything else should be illegal.
The other difference in many countries is that you aren't protected by employment laws which make it very difficult to get rid of employees... You contract can be terminated at any time, whereas firing an employee requires that they've done something seriously wrong.
If you want to pay someone 100k to work 50 hours, then specify 50 hours in the contract...
If your contracted for 40 hours and you work 60 then you're skewing the stats and making it difficult for the company to keep track of hours budgeted for a given task. If the company needs more man-hours to do a given task than they have paid for, then they really need to either be employing more staff or improving the efficiency of those they already have. Having staff work longer hours results in diminishing returns as people get tired and angry, even 40 hours is too long for many jobs and just results in people taking many breaks during the day.
What's the reasoning behind not paying overtime for someone on more than 80k? Are you assuming that they won't do any overtime, or are you expecting them to work extra hours for free?
I would always avoid any contract where the hours were not specified up front... If the company can arbitrarily demand that you work extra hours then it makes it difficult to have any kind of social life. You can't exactly make plans when you could be forced to cancel them and work instead.
Overtime should always be both optional and compensated... I certainly wouldn't want to give up my weekends and evenings for free, nor would i want to cancel important personal plans for work (this would likely result in divorce). Not to mention that if your time becomes a free resource to the company, then they have an incentive to take as much of it as they can especially when you have incompetent management who treat their staff as machines - more uptime = more work.
Very true, but employers are often greedy and treat their employees like robots...
Most people's optimal concentration span is relatively short, so anything that isn't ridiculously mundane can only be done efficiently for a few hours and regular breaks are needed... Even mundane work that doesn't require much thought will suffer from longer hours, as people will get tired and make more mistakes.
And ofcourse overworked, unhappy resentful employees won't expend any more than minimum effort.
I've seen many employers institute highly unpopular policies in an aim to increase output, only for it to have the opposite effect. Ofcourse then they blame the staff and never even consider that their own policies were the cause.
Only, they should have started working on it slowly one department at a time a few years ago...
They will probably end up finishing the migration to something else just before that too becomes unsupported and they're back in the same boat.
Spammers will find other ways to host their sites, like compromised boxes...
Also even if you pull boxes and domains after abuse complaints have been made, its usually too late because any victims have already fallen for the spam.
A cheap VPS plus a domain name would also be more than adequate for hosting your own email, or even a low power ARM based machine running at home on the end of your DSL assuming you have a static ip and an ISP that doesn't filter SMTP traffic.
As for spam filtering, a filter that's dedicted to you will usually be more effective too as it can learn about the email *You* typically receive... A lot of spam is sent around in languages like russian and chinese, but if you can't read these languages then chances are you will never receive any legitimate email written in these languages... A major email provider cannot block entire languages because they might have customers who speak those languages, but a mail server dedicated to one person can easily and reasonably do so.
Security is expensive, hardware is cheap.
You can buy from vendors who are used to dealing with clients holding confidential data, and expect them to handle returns or swallow the cost of replacements without returning the dead ones. It all depends on the contract between you and the supplier.
Or you can simply not return faulty drives, just replace them and then destroy the faulty ones.
Many places will stress test the drives for a while before putting live data on them, most drives that will fail during their useful lifespan will do so early on and can be returned at this point because they don't have any worthwhile data on them yet. Drives that fail after a few years are worthless anyway, and will just be replaced with newer higher capacity drives.
The overhead of encryption means inferior performance, higher cpu utilisation, overhead of key management, cost of dedicated crypto hardware etc... This will often outweigh the cost of a couple of extra drives should some fail.
The problem is you can't always be the one to dictate the contract terms, and quite often someone utterly incompetent will have come up with the terms...
There are organisations which are burdened with the requirement to encrypt *ALL* disks, even those on servers because someone writing the contract heard the encryption buzzword, or got a kickback from a company selling a disk encryption product.
When the contract stipulates that something must be done, even if that something is stupid then it's very easy to justify the expense and negative side effects of doing so. If something is not stipulated, it can be quite difficult to justify, even if there are significant benefits it can be hard to explain these to people with a poor understanding. Many don't care and are purely concerned with complying with the given spec, while others will assume that whoever wrote the spec knows more than you do and that the spec is gospel and cannot be wrong.
Some banks already sign their mails, albeit with s/mime instead of pgp... PGP requires a plugin for most mail clients, while s/mime is usually supported by default.
I work in security, and always sign my emails... The majority of our clients simply ignore the signature and have no idea what it is.
While we know that Apple were talking to Sony about 4k content, we don't know who else Apple were talking to about the same thing... It was Sony who leaked rather than Apple.
And there's nothing stopping them continuing selling the same plans at the same price, they just have to be honest and tell their customers that they aren't unlimited.
While these claims are probably ridiculous and with no merit, don't underestimate the speed at which medical research can progress under a regime which doesn't have morals holding the researchers back...
The nazis made significant progress.
You should teach general concepts that can be applied to any tools... If you teach the tools that are currently in use then chances are they will have been superseded by the time people leave education and enter the industry anyway. Even if the same tools are around, they will likely be much newer versions and could have significant changes that made your experience of the previous versions largely useless.
We learned wordperfect for dos in school, but i've never worked anywhere which used any version of wordperfect.
And this is even more ridiculous because most blank media, especially hard drives will never be used to store music...
If your booting from the SSD, chances are the machine will crash...
Would be much better to just stay in readonly mode, and give you the chance to copy data off (and yes im aware this is no substitute for a backup, but think of the use case of a travelling laptop far away from its backup server etc).
The Linux kernel will run on a 486 and upwards, i believe they dropped 386 because it was extremely crufty... It also still runs on m68k as far as i know, all the way back to mc68020 (i even have an m68k box to hand running a fairly modern kernel but its a 68060).
Mainstream distros compile to require modern hardware by default because it makes sense to do so, not making use of such features results in inferior performance when running on newer hardware, thats why many people use distros like gentoo where you can compile everything with support for your actual cpu.
There's nothing stopping you from compiling binaries to support older cpus, and there are distros out there which support them but that's no reason to hold everyone else back for the very few niche users who might want to run linux on a 486...
I'm also not sure why you'd want to run gcc3 on a 15 year old piece of hardware, you could always cross compile on new hardware and doing so is going to be MUCH faster.
Or just make your environment portable enough to run on anything vaguely unix-like... Linux, *BSD, Solaris etc will still compile and run extremely old code without problems.
There are plenty of old programs out there which still compile and run on current systems without problems. I have code which predates linux, and predates any 64bit hardware yet still compiles and runs (very quickly) on a modern amd64 linux host.
The only difference here is that the critical infrastructure is custom designed...
There are MANY cases where a piece of ageing critical infrastructure is actually a black box purchased from a vendor who are long since out of business, which is actually a much worse situation than these guys are in.
The Amiga may be a proprietary system, but it's also one that is well understood and has been well documented over the years. Several people who worked on development of the Amiga hardware are still active online (e.g. Dave Haynie). The custom control system sitting on top of it belongs entirely to these guys, they have the source code and still have access to the original developer.
Similarly, Amiga hardware is common enough that spares are easily available, and there are also a number of places which specialise in repairing Amiga hardware to extend its lifespan.
They could get the original developer to port the system to a new platform (although any platform current today will be just as obsolete as the amiga in 20 years and might not be as prevalent).
Amiga hardware is anything but cheap these days, at least the higher end 2000/3000/4000 models. Most of them also suffer from a few known problems (leaking clock batteries, blown capacitors). I still have a couple of amigas in the garage, and they would fetch more on the used market than any of the much newer hardware i have.
That's why people of this generation are so much better at IT than younger people...
Those who started out on C64s and similar systems got to learn the system inside out, and were encouraged to do so.
Modern computers do the exact opposite, they actively discourage kids from learning about them and instil fear to prevent them from trying anything. Systems which are too fragile and easy to break at a software level, filled with scary warnings. Kids learn by trying things and breaking stuff, and all these scary warnings will put them off. We now have a generation of people who are afraid to do anything outside of the limited sandbox, and it shows.
And how exactly would it do that?
There are CAs in most of the countries where such agencies are based, as well as plenty of others that could potentially have been compromised... Your browser will trust any one of hundreds when connecting to an SSL site.