The simple answer is Ubuntu on the desktop and CentOS/Red Hat or SLES on servers. The advantage of this arrangement is if you are looking for a job as a Linux admin or developer, these are (in my observation) the most likely distros you'll run into. A more complex question (run in 4 Mbytes, embedded, run off a floppy, ridiculous levels of security, home theater) yields extremely more complex answers.
I think he's saying that he maintains two bank accounts, the one in which his paycheck gets deposited, and a separate, unconnected bank account he uses specifically for paypal. It's actually a pretty good strategy.
What about overdrafts because PayPal withdrew too much of your money?
Stuff like that can be straightened out (I've had to do it) but it's a lot easier to do so when you have your main funds in an untouched account, and can continue to pay bills, buy food, and so forth.
I think he's saying that he maintains two bank accounts, the one in which his paycheck gets deposited, and a separate, unconnected bank account he uses specifically for paypal. It's actually a pretty good strategy.
I'm not exactly sure how all this works, but when I buy stuff from paypal, I deposit directly from my credit union into the paypal account and then pay from there. To my knowledge, MC and Visa aren't involved at all. Unless there's something I'm not understanding?
Moreover, there's a way to use your bank's billpay feature to put money directly in your paypal account. Neither of these strategies appear to involve MC/Visa. Mind you, either of these strategies take time for the transfer, so you have to plan out your purchases, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I have not, but I might soon. Daughter has a touch screen laptop with Win8 Pro, and we're both very unhappy with it. We have it on the network and talking to the printers, and I've figured out the registry change to get the apps to display, but the aspect ratio is still wrong, ACPI still doesn't work correctly and neither of us like the interface. Once I learn enough to deal with inevitable customer Win8 issues, this thing will get reimaged with something. Android might be a good choice.
So no, I don't know what Android x86 is like. I assumed it was Android, but, you know, on x86. If it's truly different, I should learn more about it.
More overlap is fine. The back end could be virtually identical (probably is already very similar) and developers would benefit. As long as they don't try to force us to use the android touch interface on non-touch chromebooks, we're golden.
Google appears to understand that presentation is a layer atop a collection of resources. Presentation is not the OS
Of course Android and Chrome won't merge. No company would be suicidal enough to try to create a single GUI paradigm intended to run on both a laptop and a touch screen appliance.
Sure you can. See that power switch on the console? Flip it to "off". Good. Now, don't flip it to "on" until transition is complete. If we're talking about live assets, especially deployed, I could agree, in many cases you can't just flip a switch. But they're machines. They can be switched off.
Charge a reasonable price. Provide updates as necessary. Don't plan for you and your kids and grandkids to retire on this one application; rather, use the profits to keep yourself in cheese nips until you build your next application. And the next one after that. In the meantime, don't worry about piracy. It costs more to pursue, in stress, money and goodwill, than you'd ever get back in additional licenses.
Decades ago, I wrote a content management system back when they weren't as common as dirt. I wanted to distribute it in a fashion where it would do the job but the code wouldn't be directly copyable. It's obvious in retrospect how stupid that was. It was all for nothing , and all that time spent could have been spent on my next product instead.
It's becoming increasingly evident that the Nielson demographic is no longer relevant in part because of the age factor. The people who routinely watch TV in real time with commercials, eating off TV trays and leafing through physical copies of TV Guide, are grandparents now, or great-grandparents. And those young people still watching TV (if they're not oldpharts lying about their age) in real time are by definition somewhat disconnected from technology. This has to skew the results in interesting ways.
Parenthetically, isn't it interesting how companies think that years of experience and expertise can be somehow magically transferred to a noob in a few weeks. There seems to be no understanding that programming (or most kinds of engineering) done well...
Most professions that rely heavily on experience & talent are viewed that way by outsiders -- you can even see the attitude here on Slashdot aimed at non-STEM professionals like writers, sociologists, or teachers. Very few people seem to be capable of gauging how much effort goes into it unless they've already worked at building up a related talent (or tried, failed, and were honest with themselves why).
That's fair. Although having had to fight the local school system regarding their handling of my daughter (who is severely dyslexic, but had been diagnosed by her teachers as ADD) I've seen too many teachers who are just going through the motions, more interested in making as little effort as possible than actually teaching children.
I was thinking specifically of the current vogue of replacing older experienced talent with cheaper graduates, or outsourcing to offshore resources. In the first case, you have enthusiasm and the willingness to work long hours, but little experience, and the company ultimately finds out that they're paying for the same mistakes over and over again as younger kids are hired to replace those who discovered that free-form amorphous coding is a bad idea. In the latter case, management will insist that procedures can replace talent and experience, and they inevitably are left with a mess, that often gets blamed on the employees that were laid off, for not properly documenting their jobs before they lost them. And the fundamental misunderstanding is that you can't turn talent and insight into a set of procedures, else we'd be a lot further along with AI than we are currently.
Going back to teaching just for a second, a major vendor with which I do business just recently outsourced their online training to India. It's a complete disaster. Classes have become someone reading the overheads to you in an accent you can barely understand, and deferring all questions to technical support. They're not there to teach, they're there to fill a mangerial line item.
The point is, regardless of what you or I might think about it, life finds a way. And the more onerous the circumstances, the more life will endeavor to find a way.
In this case, by trying to lock down the player manufacturers, DRM creates a brisk market in solutions that defeat DRM. I also suspect that since ripped video can be played on a variety of media, the big losers are the DVD player manufacturers. Which is probably part of the reason they're trying to branch out into other media sources, like netflix and amazon built into the player.
Interestingly enough, many DVD/Blu-Ray players excel at playing illegally downloaded content. What do you think that USB slot is *really* for?
As you said yourself, creating good code is not something one would expect a beginning-wage employee fresh out of college to create. At best, your replacement might be able to maintain the code already created.
So, basically, whatever you do isn't going to be sufficient if the employer needs major changes to the code. Therefore, I guess it depends on your relationship with the contractor. If you say "here's the source code, good luck" and leave, or if you break it down "this is where the majority of the work is done" and "when the program counter wraps, it picks this instruction off the drum at 000, and that's how it exits the loop"...oops, wrong story... where was I? Oh, yeah, how much you tell him is up to you, as whatever you say won't make a whole lot of difference.
Parenthetically, isn't it interesting how companies think that years of experience and expertise can be somehow magically transferred to a noob in a few weeks. There seems to be no understanding that programming (or most kinds of engineering) done well, involves a way of thinking, strategies for attacking a problem, in some cases skills in squirreling out information and a knack for implementation, that bears no resemblance to a "collection of secrets".
Looking for my tinfoil hat... not in that drawer... not in the bookcase... THERE it is behind the monitor. A little wrinkled, one moment. (rustle) There.
Wow, it's as if, had the recent media scandals not existed, it would have been necessary to invent them.
I'm very sorry to say that in the late 90's a 100W power supply was generally pretty sufficient, but these days you'll find no shortage of 600W or 1KW power supplies. I don't know how much my current system pulls, but the preceding one idled at about 115 Watts, and I kept it longer than I "should" have because it was relatively efficient for its time.
Cell phones have also tended to demand more and more power in order to get that full multi-media smartphone edge.
On the other hand, replacing CRTs with solid-state monitors was a big jump in the other direction, and if you want to really feel all hippy greenie eco-friendly, you can do a lot with a Raspberry Pi and it only pulls about 5 watts. It's no gamer machine, but it still outperforms the desktops of the 90's.
Right, but the power supply rating is different than the average power consumed. Power in a PC tends to vary with what the PC is doing. Hard drives, monitors, CPUs, tend to consume more power under heavy load than they do just sitting there, especially with modern improvements in power management. I think the 75 watt statistic was meant to represent the *average* amount of power consumed over time, taking into account long periods of unuse, not the peak amount of power the computer was capable of consuming. And it is the average power consumption that is important in this thread.
"Cell phones have also tended to demand more and more power in order to get that full multi-media smartphone edge"...Except that over longer periods of time, the circuitry in cell phones have been going through a design process to consume less and less power per use of a particular feature. Longer and longer talk times for a cell thinner than a paper tablet aren't entirely due to battery improvements, there have been a lot of engineering into making the circuits consume less power. So, for a given generation of silicon, more capabilities may mean more power consumed, but major new capabilities often are precluded by a new generation of silicon.
But the bottom line is that it's the actual power consumed relative to gross power consumption for heat, lights, and environmental cooling, to which I will add major appliances, is the real issue, and I believe you'll find that the power consumed by your geeky devices is down in the noise compared to the major consumers in your life.
Personally, I don't pay any attention to hippy greeny stuff, and my computers are configured to never sleep, and for the hard drives to never turn off. Just pointing out the fallacy of the argument.
It's similar to the fuss 15 - 20 years ago of showers over baths. There was a perception that a bath consumed less water because you don't have water running down the drain the entire time you're bathing yourself. Yet the fact remains that except under bizarre circumstances, baths always consume *more* water. And the test is easy -- put the plug in, and take a shower. Note that when you're done, there's only maybe 2 - 3 inches of water in the tub. Now think of how much water is in the tub during a typical bath.
Back to power, "more" or "less" for a given device isn't nearly as important as the percentage the device consumes relative to your total power consumption.
Well, he has a point in that the place where you actually stand in line waiting for a cashier to open up is festooned with soda, junk food and remaindered DVD movies. I was thinking of the path up to the check-out line, which has the porn rack on the left and the blank CD/DVD bins on the right. (For sharing porn with friends?)
Maybe we should expand the definition to "The electronics, porn, useless crap, and junk food place".
> 'Notice that you have not been asked to switch off anything really inconvenient, like your heating or air-conditioning, television, computer, mobile phone, or any of the myriad technologies that depend on affordable, plentiful energy electricity and make modern life possible.
I can't address all of these, but computer? I read back in the late nineties that computers dissipate a power level less than a 75 watt bulb, probably less now with power conservation and "green" designs. And cell phones? Miniscule, compared to generating light or heat. Televisions? Maybe old tube type, or really humongous sets now, but in general, I'm under the impression that they don't use that much power. He has a point about air conditioning (in most cases) and heat, but those, plus light, are gross uses of power.
I'm not convinced that a given individual's electronics would be a substantial percentage of their personal, total power footprint. (There are probably alpha nerds out there who heat their rooms with i-products and only use them in the dark, but I'm thinking not many.)
The contention seems to be that what you should switch off is measured by convenience rather than actual power usage. This seems an conceptual error.
It shouldn't be hard to make an app for that. Digitize the crash of a bakelite handset on a rotary phone, and make an app that plays that clip before disconnecting.
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The simple answer is Ubuntu on the desktop and CentOS/Red Hat or SLES on servers. The advantage of this arrangement is if you are looking for a job as a Linux admin or developer, these are (in my observation) the most likely distros you'll run into. A more complex question (run in 4 Mbytes, embedded, run off a floppy, ridiculous levels of security, home theater) yields extremely more complex answers.
I think he's saying that he maintains two bank accounts, the one in which his paycheck gets deposited, and a separate, unconnected bank account he uses specifically for paypal. It's actually a pretty good strategy.
What about overdrafts because PayPal withdrew too much of your money?
Stuff like that can be straightened out (I've had to do it) but it's a lot easier to do so when you have your main funds in an untouched account, and can continue to pay bills, buy food, and so forth.
I think he's saying that he maintains two bank accounts, the one in which his paycheck gets deposited, and a separate, unconnected bank account he uses specifically for paypal. It's actually a pretty good strategy.
I'm not exactly sure how all this works, but when I buy stuff from paypal, I deposit directly from my credit union into the paypal account and then pay from there. To my knowledge, MC and Visa aren't involved at all. Unless there's something I'm not understanding?
Moreover, there's a way to use your bank's billpay feature to put money directly in your paypal account. Neither of these strategies appear to involve MC/Visa. Mind you, either of these strategies take time for the transfer, so you have to plan out your purchases, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
> Have you ever installed Android-x86?
I have not, but I might soon. Daughter has a touch screen laptop with Win8 Pro, and we're both very unhappy with it. We have it on the network and talking to the printers, and I've figured out the registry change to get the apps to display, but the aspect ratio is still wrong, ACPI still doesn't work correctly and neither of us like the interface. Once I learn enough to deal with inevitable customer Win8 issues, this thing will get reimaged with something. Android might be a good choice.
So no, I don't know what Android x86 is like. I assumed it was Android, but, you know, on x86. If it's truly different, I should learn more about it.
Oooh. Good point!
More overlap is fine. The back end could be virtually identical (probably is already very similar) and developers would benefit. As long as they don't try to force us to use the android touch interface on non-touch chromebooks, we're golden.
Google appears to understand that presentation is a layer atop a collection of resources. Presentation is not the OS
Of course Android and Chrome won't merge. No company would be suicidal enough to try to create a single GUI paradigm intended to run on both a laptop and a touch screen appliance.
Wait...
Well, then, we need to get all those drone strikes completed before 2016.
> "You can’t just flip a switch"
Sure you can. See that power switch on the console? Flip it to "off". Good. Now, don't flip it to "on" until transition is complete. If we're talking about live assets, especially deployed, I could agree, in many cases you can't just flip a switch. But they're machines. They can be switched off.
Charge a reasonable price. Provide updates as necessary. Don't plan for you and your kids and grandkids to retire on this one application; rather, use the profits to keep yourself in cheese nips until you build your next application. And the next one after that. In the meantime, don't worry about piracy. It costs more to pursue, in stress, money and goodwill, than you'd ever get back in additional licenses.
Decades ago, I wrote a content management system back when they weren't as common as dirt. I wanted to distribute it in a fashion where it would do the job but the code wouldn't be directly copyable. It's obvious in retrospect how stupid that was. It was all for nothing , and all that time spent could have been spent on my next product instead.
It's becoming increasingly evident that the Nielson demographic is no longer relevant in part because of the age factor. The people who routinely watch TV in real time with commercials, eating off TV trays and leafing through physical copies of TV Guide, are grandparents now, or great-grandparents. And those young people still watching TV (if they're not oldpharts lying about their age) in real time are by definition somewhat disconnected from technology. This has to skew the results in interesting ways.
Parenthetically, isn't it interesting how companies think that years of experience and expertise can be somehow magically transferred to a noob in a few weeks. There seems to be no understanding that programming (or most kinds of engineering) done well ...
Most professions that rely heavily on experience & talent are viewed that way by outsiders -- you can even see the attitude here on Slashdot aimed at non-STEM professionals like writers, sociologists, or teachers. Very few people seem to be capable of gauging how much effort goes into it unless they've already worked at building up a related talent (or tried, failed, and were honest with themselves why).
That's fair. Although having had to fight the local school system regarding their handling of my daughter (who is severely dyslexic, but had been diagnosed by her teachers as ADD) I've seen too many teachers who are just going through the motions, more interested in making as little effort as possible than actually teaching children.
I was thinking specifically of the current vogue of replacing older experienced talent with cheaper graduates, or outsourcing to offshore resources. In the first case, you have enthusiasm and the willingness to work long hours, but little experience, and the company ultimately finds out that they're paying for the same mistakes over and over again as younger kids are hired to replace those who discovered that free-form amorphous coding is a bad idea. In the latter case, management will insist that procedures can replace talent and experience, and they inevitably are left with a mess, that often gets blamed on the employees that were laid off, for not properly documenting their jobs before they lost them. And the fundamental misunderstanding is that you can't turn talent and insight into a set of procedures, else we'd be a lot further along with AI than we are currently.
Going back to teaching just for a second, a major vendor with which I do business just recently outsourced their online training to India. It's a complete disaster. Classes have become someone reading the overheads to you in an accent you can barely understand, and deferring all questions to technical support. They're not there to teach, they're there to fill a mangerial line item.
The point is, regardless of what you or I might think about it, life finds a way. And the more onerous the circumstances, the more life will endeavor to find a way.
In this case, by trying to lock down the player manufacturers, DRM creates a brisk market in solutions that defeat DRM. I also suspect that since ripped video can be played on a variety of media, the big losers are the DVD player manufacturers. Which is probably part of the reason they're trying to branch out into other media sources, like netflix and amazon built into the player.
Interestingly enough, many DVD/Blu-Ray players excel at playing illegally downloaded content. What do you think that USB slot is *really* for?
Yeah. Wow, this is a GEEK group? For shame.
As you said yourself, creating good code is not something one would expect a beginning-wage employee fresh out of college to create. At best, your replacement might be able to maintain the code already created.
So, basically, whatever you do isn't going to be sufficient if the employer needs major changes to the code. Therefore, I guess it depends on your relationship with the contractor. If you say "here's the source code, good luck" and leave, or if you break it down "this is where the majority of the work is done" and "when the program counter wraps, it picks this instruction off the drum at 000, and that's how it exits the loop" ...oops, wrong story... where was I? Oh, yeah, how much you tell him is up to you, as whatever you say won't make a whole lot of difference.
Parenthetically, isn't it interesting how companies think that years of experience and expertise can be somehow magically transferred to a noob in a few weeks. There seems to be no understanding that programming (or most kinds of engineering) done well, involves a way of thinking, strategies for attacking a problem, in some cases skills in squirreling out information and a knack for implementation, that bears no resemblance to a "collection of secrets".
Looking for my tinfoil hat... not in that drawer... not in the bookcase... THERE it is behind the monitor. A little wrinkled, one moment. (rustle) There.
Wow, it's as if, had the recent media scandals not existed, it would have been necessary to invent them.
I'm very sorry to say that in the late 90's a 100W power supply was generally pretty sufficient, but these days you'll find no shortage of 600W or 1KW power supplies. I don't know how much my current system pulls, but the preceding one idled at about 115 Watts, and I kept it longer than I "should" have because it was relatively efficient for its time.
Cell phones have also tended to demand more and more power in order to get that full multi-media smartphone edge.
On the other hand, replacing CRTs with solid-state monitors was a big jump in the other direction, and if you want to really feel all hippy greenie eco-friendly, you can do a lot with a Raspberry Pi and it only pulls about 5 watts. It's no gamer machine, but it still outperforms the desktops of the 90's.
Right, but the power supply rating is different than the average power consumed. Power in a PC tends to vary with what the PC is doing. Hard drives, monitors, CPUs, tend to consume more power under heavy load than they do just sitting there, especially with modern improvements in power management. I think the 75 watt statistic was meant to represent the *average* amount of power consumed over time, taking into account long periods of unuse, not the peak amount of power the computer was capable of consuming. And it is the average power consumption that is important in this thread.
"Cell phones have also tended to demand more and more power in order to get that full multi-media smartphone edge" ...Except that over longer periods of time, the circuitry in cell phones have been going through a design process to consume less and less power per use of a particular feature. Longer and longer talk times for a cell thinner than a paper tablet aren't entirely due to battery improvements, there have been a lot of engineering into making the circuits consume less power. So, for a given generation of silicon, more capabilities may mean more power consumed, but major new capabilities often are precluded by a new generation of silicon.
But the bottom line is that it's the actual power consumed relative to gross power consumption for heat, lights, and environmental cooling, to which I will add major appliances, is the real issue, and I believe you'll find that the power consumed by your geeky devices is down in the noise compared to the major consumers in your life.
Personally, I don't pay any attention to hippy greeny stuff, and my computers are configured to never sleep, and for the hard drives to never turn off. Just pointing out the fallacy of the argument.
It's similar to the fuss 15 - 20 years ago of showers over baths. There was a perception that a bath consumed less water because you don't have water running down the drain the entire time you're bathing yourself. Yet the fact remains that except under bizarre circumstances, baths always consume *more* water. And the test is easy -- put the plug in, and take a shower. Note that when you're done, there's only maybe 2 - 3 inches of water in the tub. Now think of how much water is in the tub during a typical bath.
Back to power, "more" or "less" for a given device isn't nearly as important as the percentage the device consumes relative to your total power consumption.
Well, he has a point in that the place where you actually stand in line waiting for a cashier to open up is festooned with soda, junk food and remaindered DVD movies. I was thinking of the path up to the check-out line, which has the porn rack on the left and the blank CD/DVD bins on the right. (For sharing porn with friends?)
Maybe we should expand the definition to "The electronics, porn, useless crap, and junk food place".
> 'Notice that you have not been asked to switch off anything really inconvenient, like your heating or air-conditioning, television, computer, mobile phone, or any of the myriad technologies that depend on affordable, plentiful energy electricity and make modern life possible.
I can't address all of these, but computer? I read back in the late nineties that computers dissipate a power level less than a 75 watt bulb, probably less now with power conservation and "green" designs. And cell phones? Miniscule, compared to generating light or heat. Televisions? Maybe old tube type, or really humongous sets now, but in general, I'm under the impression that they don't use that much power. He has a point about air conditioning (in most cases) and heat, but those, plus light, are gross uses of power.
I'm not convinced that a given individual's electronics would be a substantial percentage of their personal, total power footprint. (There are probably alpha nerds out there who heat their rooms with i-products and only use them in the dark, but I'm thinking not many.)
The contention seems to be that what you should switch off is measured by convenience rather than actual power usage. This seems an conceptual error.
It shouldn't be hard to make an app for that. Digitize the crash of a bakelite handset on a rotary phone, and make an app that plays that clip before disconnecting.
> The law community needs to seriously start thinking about an internal purge of these types of lawyers.
Yes. Lawyers have a bad enough reputation as it is; these guys are just making it worse. The legal system needs to realize that and take action.
Maybe young nerds, after you've done all the porn on the internet you can move on to getting things done.
I don't think that's physically possible.