Yet the Mac survived despite similarly being a proprietary design, it wasn't until Windows 95 came out that the Mac became technically inferior -- MacOS 8 and Windows 3.1 were pretty comparable technically, but Windows 95 had real multitasking and while it crashed a lot, so did MacOS 8.
The reality is that Commodore was mismanaged was mismanaged from the day Tramiel left. I doubt Tramiel could have done much better -- see his track record at Atari -- but he was replaced by idiots who had no idea how to run a computer company.
Disclaimer: I interviewed at Commodore as an engineer in early 1991. The product they were working on at the time was the CDTV. Just looking at the prototype I could see no point to it -- it was too expensive for the big box retailers to sell as a game console, and at the time they weren't interested in selling computers (this was before you could walk into Walmart and buy a PC). I ended up going elsewhere and adventuring in non-computer-related fields for a while before getting back into computing with Linux in 1995, releasing our first commercial product for Linux in June 1996 (a school administration package ported from SCO Unix and which we sold as part and parcel of an administrative solution to school districts including computers, terminals, and administrative software). Linux brought the fun back into computing that died with the 1980's, it was an adventure there in the late 90's. Now it's just a job, but I'm older and okay with that.
The C64 was basically the Arduino of its day. For budding hardware hackers, it had lots of parallel I/O pins right there on the back of the computer, accessible with a simple card connector. I controlled a calibration oven for directional drilling probes with the thing in the late 1980's, using a custom BASIC program to run the analog to digital converters via bit-banging pins on the CIA (the parallel I/O chip). I also used it for a weather radar system used on offshore oil rigs, that one was mostly 6502 assembly code and again bit-banging data on the CIA. The computer came with a complete hardware schematic that basically encouraged doing things like this. I even designed my own cards to plug into the "cartridge port" for doing various things.
Yeah, it sucked as a computer. But it was a hardware hacker's dream toy. There wasn't anything like it ever again until the Arduinos and Raspberry Pi arrived around 2010 or so.
No it didn't. You could replace ROM libraries with disk-based libraries without a problem at system boot. The only libraries that had to be in the ROM were the disk libraries (else you couldn't load libraries off of disk, duh) and even there, you could replace them after boot. There was a standard API call to get a library handle, that API call didn't care where the library lived, whether disk or ROM, it looked on disk first, and only then did it look for the library in ROM. In fact, workbench.library lived on disk in the very last Amiga 4000 variant because there wasn't enough room in the ROM for it. That said, in the days before systems with 96 gigabytes of RAM, replacing a ROM to upgrade your version of AmigaOS made more sense than using precious RAM to hold copies of libraries. Remember, large numbers of Amigas only had 1 megabyte of memory (I had to scrimp and save to buy a 4 megabyte board for my Amiga 2000) and most never even had hard drives.... I did add an 80 megabyte (!) SCSI hard drive to my Amiga 2000, but the drive plus controller cost almost as much as the computer at the time.
Windows 95 wasn't any worse from a customer point of view than the Amiga. Both crashed regularly for the same reason -- lack of memory protection. The Amiga was the only pre-emptive multitasking consumer OS before Windows 95 (I don't consider OS/2 to be a consumer OS, its hardware requirements were far higher than a consumer OS, it was a business workstation OS). Once Windows 95 brought that to the Windows world, there was literally no reason for the Amiga to exist anymore -- everything it could do, Windows 95 could do, maybe not as elegantly but for a much lower price.
Thus why the Amiga technology basically died with Commodore -- oh sure, various companies bought the intellectual property over the years, but none of them invested any money in it to bring out new computers. There just wasn't any business logic to doing so in a world that contained Windows 95.
Exactly. So why do you recite a valid criticism of FileVault1, which had exactly the problems you mentioned due to it being layered as a DMG on an unencrypted filesystem, as if it applied to FileVault2, which is an *entirely different technology*?
Once upon a time, like ten years ago, File Vault encrypted home folders as a dmg file on a partition. That is no longer the case and has not been the case for years. File Vault doesn't work like that anymore, and it hasn't worked like that for years. Now it's whole disk encryption like Microsoft's Bitlocker, and utterly bulletproof. The only way to lose your disk is to overwrite the key blocks at the start of the disk.
I still have most of the Commodore 64 code that I ever wrote, even though the computers are sitting in my brother's attic 2,000 miles from here and the disks are long gone. As I've upgraded platforms I've pulled in my files from the previous platforms, and now we have emulators so I could even run the programs again if I wished. This obviously isn't going to help with things that had a hardware component like my card for interfacing a Commodore 64 with a 1571 disk drive at full 1571 speed (wire-wrapped, naturally, and using a ROM simulator SRAM chip to hold my code), but (shrug). The whole need for that is really not there anymore since a simulated 1541 is ridiculously faster than the real thing was.
I would use an Arduino board with a Bluetooth adapter to do all the grunt work, and use the (Android) smartphone just for the user interface, talking to the Arduino via a Serial profile. We do something like that in ham radio nowadays to interface APRS with Android tablets, with the Android tablet providing GPS coordinates to be outputted as ham radio packets to the APRS system, and accepting GPS coordinates sent via packet radio from the ham-radio-interfaced Arduino to display the call signs of surrounding ham radio stations on the Android tablet's display . (Can't do it with iDevices because Apple won't open up access to the Serial profile).
The capacitors are easy to replace. The chips are fat and happy NMOS that are somewhat static sensitive but otherwise pretty indestructible. The big problem with the chips is the 6526 CIA, which is the parallel port chip that is likely interfaced with the balancer machine. Those tend to pop if you stare at them wrong because the raw digital lines go directly from the CIA pins to that port on the back with no (zero) buffering, and it's been quite a while since they were manufactured. I used to pop them all the time when interfacing my wire-wrapped gadgets to my Commodore 64 and our local Commodore repair center knew me by name and when I came in the door immediately went in the back and got a 6526 out of his tubes of spares to sell to me. That was, of course, thirty years ago. Today they can still be found on eBay as pulls from recycled machines, but with the normal caveats of buying recycled components from eBay -- i.e.,. most of the time the seller has no way of testing them, so what you get may or may not work.
Err, no. The SID chip is on the motherboard of the Commodore 64 (the schematic is even in the technical manual -- want to see my copy?) and is mixed with the television signal out the RF port on the back, or is available as a pin on the 8-pin round audio-video connector on the back of the Commodore 64, from whence it can go into a 1702 monitor (via an 8-pin to 8-pin cable) or broken out and sent to a powered speaker (via an 8-pin to RCA breakout cable, which also allowed hooking to a normal composite monitor). The 1541 has nothing to do with sound.
Back in the day, the Commodore 64 was often used for industrial applications like this where the cosmetics of having a trash computer were outweighed by the cost savings of using a common off-the-shelf piece of hardware that had a bunch of easily controlled digital I/O lines hanging out on a card edge connector on the back. In the late 80's I had a contract to write software to display weather radar on a C-64 screen where the resulting consoles were deployed on offshore oil rigs talking back to the homeland over 1200 baud radio modems. I also had a contract to do the heat and magnetic calibration on directional drilling probes, where the signals from the drilling probe went through an analog to digital converter and were then bit-banged in over the parallel port lines on a Commodore 64.
Today I'd probably use something like an Arduino for things like that. But that of course didn't exist back then.
You can bet that these contracts have forced arbitration in them -- you must agree to forced arbitration, or you don't get your severance pay. Because that's how evil banks roll.
So why is that bad? Well, consumers win 40% of the time when they sue a bank in court. But if a consumer instead is forced into arbitration because of a forced arbitration clause in the contract, consumers win less than 4% of the time, according to a study of arbitration decisions in California. I.e., forced arbitration basically means you signed away your right to sue in any meaningful way -- and the Supreme Court has upheld those agreements as fair and reasonable, so you can't even appeal to a "real" court.
Apple gave fair warning to vendors that they wanted sandboxed applications to be the standard for the platform. Sandboxed applications do not run out of system directories, they are basically "jailed" in their own sandboxes. Microsoft, like most software vendors, ignored Apple. So now the vendors are reaping the rewards of what they sowed.
The bigger problem with El Capitan lies with virtualization and VPN software. These need to make changes to the system routing and interface tables to properly route packets between virtual machines and the Internet, or between the local host and the other end of a VPN tunnel. El Capitan breaks our VPN at work and I have advised our employees to not upgrade to El Capitan due to this fact until Apple and VPN vendors come up with a solution to this problem. I certainly am not going to advise employees on how to disable Apple's security system (SIP), that would be lunacy on my part akin to telling employees how to disable virus protection on their Windows laptops given the increasing threat level for Macs recently.
In the end, we need more secure systems, and Apple is providing one. The fact that it breaks existing applications and inconveniences users is unsurprising. It would have been surprising if that *hadn't* happened -- which is one reason why consumer operating systems are so insecure (because making them secure breaks so much stuff).
Yep. Microwave fade. It's inherent in ultra high wavelength transmissions. That said, we have modulation techniques today that have effective error correction, unlike back in the day when this was all done with FM and you ended up losing data when you had poor conditions. Think about how your mobile phone gets massive bandwidth and reliability out of OFDMA (LTE's downlink technology) under much worse propagation conditions in city canyons, and scale that to microwave frequencies.
That said, given the bandwidth limitations of long distance microwave technology and improvements in fiber technology over the past five years, it seems to me that this is a solution whose problem is already on the way out. NTT has fiber that can transmit 69.1 tbit/sec over a 240km distance. Out here in the West you can put towers on top of mountains to get line of sight for that long of a distance, but practically speaking you won't get line of sight for more than 100km or so in the flatlands without an enormously tall and expensive tower. The network between Chicago and NYC mentioned in the paper has towers every 70km and runs at 400mbit/sec. Clearly fiber can do that distance, and with much better bandwidth.
The Central Valley of California is sitting on rich topsoil over 100 feet deep. Before the modern water projects, it mostly grew winter wheat, because there's enough moisture in winter (the rainy season in California) for that in most years. The Central Valley is technically a Mediterranean climate, not a desert (though the southern part of the Valley is technically semi-desert). But the water projects made it profitable and possible to grow crops year-round rather than just in the winter, mining that 100 feet of topsoil for food. Telling people they can't mine a resource like that doesn't go down well with Americans, who tend to be an ornery sort.
An example is almonds. Almonds now use close to 10% of water used in California. One almond takes approximately 1.1 gallons of water to create it.
So: Why, in the midst of drought, are California farmers planting *more* almonds? The answer, paradoxically, is because water has become more expensive. The water projects are not delivering water to California farmers, so California farmers have a choice between a) not growing crops (and thereby losing their farm, since no crops means they can't pay the mortgages they took out on their farm equipment and/or farmland to expand in earlier more optimistic times), or b) drilling wells. Drilling wells that in some cases are a thousand feet or more deep. The water from these wells is ridiculously expensive for two reasons: 1) the simple cost of drilling, and 2) the large amount of electricity needed to haul that water (at 8 pounds per gallon) up that 1,000+ feet of pipe to the surface.
In fact, the water from these wells is so expensive that if the farmers used it to grow a low-water-use crop like wheat they'd lose money. Most low-water-use crops like wheat or corn have a relatively low price on the commodities market, a price that will not pay for the cost of the well and the electricity to pump water out of the well. So, paradoxically, expensive water has caused farmers to instead grow almonds -- one of the only crops that sell for a higher price than the cost of the water needed to grow them, yet also one of the most water-thirsty crops on the planet.
And now you know the side of the story you don't get from the Libertarian free market think tanks and their notion that expensive water would cause water usage by farmers to decline. What matters to farmers is *not* the absolute cost of the water. What matters to the farmers is the *marginal* cost of the water -- the difference between what it costs to obtain the water, and what income they get from using the water. When water was cheap but in limited supply, farmers grew crops that were water-thrifty because the price of those commodities was enough to pay for the water. Now that water is expensive but they can pump as much as they wish from the ground (until the aquifer runs dry, anyhow!), the California farmer's slogan becomes "drill, baybee, drill!" and the almond trees go in.
Actually, 65% of rich people in the United States (defined as the top 1% of income level) were born rich, according to the latest report I read on intergenerational income mobility in the United States. The only resources or intelligence they were ever required to exercise were to call Daddy when they needed more money. In my experience they're not stupid, but the documentary "Born Rich" probably gives you a good sense of the bubble they're born and raised in and its effects on them.
Just as with the AMT now hitting middle class families, current US tax policy against expatriates merely uses rich people as an excuse to be abusive towards middle class expatriates. Truly rich expatriates don't make money income (their income is investment income typically "earned" in the United States) so are not subject to this insanity.
It is always wise to distinguish between the propaganda used to pass a law, and the actual effects and purpose of the law.
People whose field is IT tend to have children whose field is IT. And while the world is large, the SF Bay area is still the center of the technology startup world. The amount of money invested in SF Bay area technology startups every year by venture capitalists is greater than the amount of money they invest in technology in the entire rest of the world. While I agree that you can be a sysadmin anywhere, if you want to work on game-changing technology there's a mouth-drooling variety of possibilities in the SF Bay Area. I resisted moving to the SF Bay Area for years, but there's just too much cool stuff going on here to move away again.
I do not know these specific children so I have no idea if they have any desire to create leading-edge technology in the future. If they don't, US citizenship is just trouble. If they do, however, US citizenship opens up interesting vistas in one of the few places in the United States that isn't turning into a seedy dump.
As you say, the big advantage to having US citizenship is if they go into technology and want to work in Silicon Valley. No worries about green cards, H1B, etc., just move there and go to work.
The big disadvantage is taxes. But boy, what a disadvantage. It's like the US is trying to build a Berlin Wall around the USA to keep people in. Makes you wonder what our leaders know that we don't know about where our country is going.
Regarding renouncing citizenship, that isn't as difficult or expensive as described above, but if not done right you can be arrested for tax evasion if you ever set foot on US soil again -- even if just transiting to another country, such as flying from Paris to Toronto (which has a stopover in New York City). Ask Maher Arar about that one...
Yes, NetworkManager should be fine on most servers. Unless you want to use network bonding. And VLANs. And bridges. Nevermind bridged VLAN's (yes, those are a thing) on top of 802.3Ad bonds. And... and... well, 90% of the other functionality that is offered by the Linux networking stack. NetworkManager works fine for managing the 10% of the network stack that is used 90% of the time. For the other 10% of the time, it is an abortion that should be taken out back of the barn and shot like a rabid dog. And this other 10% that NetworkManager won't do is 99% of why people pay me big bucks to make Linux do what they need it to do, since you will not get high performance networking out of a server using the limited functionality provided by NetworkManager. As in, the servers I work with generally have at least half a dozen gigabit NICs and two 10Gbit NIC's. NetworkManager won't get me 1/10th of what I need to put these servers into the midst of a large network for use in server consolidation, and is utterly useless once we start talking about Open vSwitch and other such SDN components.
So sure, if you're a sandwich shop putting a $500 server under the cash register, or you are a teenage college student setting up a video sharing network for your bro's in the flop house you board in, NetworkManager will work fine for you. For those of us doing anything more complex, it is a useless abomination and the first thing done when bringing up a new server image is "chkconfig NetworkManager off ; service NetworkManager stop". (Or the AbominationD equivalents thereof).
In fact, they are expanding it -- they are putting in a brand new data center on the site that was the former Counterpane Security, on LaAvenida across from their SV HQ, and they also have leased a huge building a couple of blocks away on Pear Street. There's also rumors that they're behind the demolishing of an entire block of tilt-ups between LaAvenida and Pear to be replaced by six-story office buildings. In any event Microsoft isn't leaving the Silicon Valley, just Microsoft Research is leaving -- all fifty employees. Every single one of them who can have a job tomorrow by walking down the street to the Googleplex. Not a single one of whom have ever created a product for Microsoft, because Microsoft doesn't create products anymore, they just re-invent other people's products (or their own previously-good products), badly.
You're actually talking about MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks), a technology that I first encountered in 2002. Now-bankrupt Copan Systems was the company I first encountered that was doing MAID, and New SGI (i.e. former Rackable Systems) bought their assets out of bankruptcy in 2010. Most storage companies now offer MAID add-ons for their storage arrays, though not all of them allow completely powering down the drive like Copan's solution did.
The upsides of MAID: Disks are cheap. Turning on and spinning up a hard drive to pull up some bits is faster than a robot fetching a Blu-Ray disk, placing it into a drive in the jukebox, and waiting for the disk to spin up and come online. You could store many more bytes in a cabinet with MAID than you could in an optical disk cabinet.
Downsides: The disk drives in a MAID array simply don't last that long, comparatively speaking. Spinning them up and down all the time is hard on a drive. So you end up having to replicate data and from time to time migrate data to new drives as old drives reach their service life. The service life of rarely used Blu-Ray media that has always been handled robotically (i.e., nothing touching its surfaces ever) is such that Blu-Ray media from ten years ago is probably still usable, the technology itself will become obsolete like DVD-RAM long before the media wears out. Not so much with hard drives, though disk arrays basically have unlimited life given typical failure patterns (i.e., if you're using RAID6, a drive develops errors, you remove the failing drive from the array, rebuild the array on a new drive, and chances of having two more drives fail during rebuild and thus losing the array are slim for a 12-drive array). So MAID has not really taken off the way we expected ten years ago.
At the time I first encountered MAID I was working for a company called DISC Storage, which had a NAS head which would automatically migrate little-used data to an optical jukebox in a way similar to what Facebook appears to be attempting. I designed and implemented the clustering function that would replicate the data between two NAS heads / optical jukeboxes, since the DVD-RAM platters were not themselves RAID'ed, as well as implemented a lot of the back end functionality for jukebox control and so forth. In any event, it looked like a NAS head but most of the files had been migrated to the DVD-RAM platters, and if you accessed one of those files, you would (at some point maybe 15 seconds later) get your data back as the file got read back onto the hard drive. It worked. But it was somewhat slow and cumbersome, because you're relying on a robot to go out and fetch the disk and put it in a drive, and disk robots then, and now, simply aren't that fast compared to media that's already in a drive ready to be spun up and read.
So anyhow, it was fairly obvious to me by mid 2003 that optical jukeboxes simply weren't going to be the future. In the ten years since DISC went under (there is a German company by that name now but it isn't the same company, it bought the name and some of the IP), I have not had any inclination to work for a company doing optical storage, because it's clear that for most problems it isn't the solution. It's too slow, too bulky, and magnetic disk drives and magnetic tape drives just continue getting bigger and cheaper every day. And now, with SSD coming on strong, optical jukeboxes look even less compelling.
So color me amazed. Optical jukebox and optical media technology essentially has barely moved on in the past ten years and what wasn't particularly compelling then, is even less compelling now. If you have need to keep data for a *long* time, this is how you do it... but frankly, I will be surprised if Facebook even exists ten years from now given the pace of innovation in the industry (though I'm just as surprised that Slashdot still exists!), so I question why they would do this rather than invest in LTO tape libraries, which have the advantage of being significantly denser.
Re:It's not an attempt to "game the system"...
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The 2014 Hugo Awards
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Orson Scott Card is proof that ideology doesn't stop you from winning Hugos. All that is necessary is to write something interesting and mind-blowing. Writing formulatic space operas that are basically 1950's Don Pendleton manly war-fighting men set in space rather than in the wilds of darkest Africa or Southeast Asia is not the sort of thing that gathers awards, those have been done so many times that they're mind candy, something entertaining if in a certain mood but hardly mind blowing. Neither are fifteen page dissertations on why Libertarianism is the only proper ideology for running a space station. Nobody wants an ideological tract when they read science fiction, they want to have their mind blown. Orson Scott Card's later books haven't won Hugos not because of his right wing ideology, but, rather, because they've been boring, having nothing new to offer over his earlier fiction that did win awards. Which is a shame, because his 80's output was ridiculously good, then he got full of himself and his output got boring.
I liked Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as a work of fiction, and probably would have nominated it for an award that year if I hadn't been 2 years old at the time. L. Neil Smith's work, on the other hand, read like Libertarian tracts with cardboard characters and stereotypical plots, I read a couple of them and was, like, "meh", even though at the time I considered myself somewhat Libertarian and liked a number of other Prometheus Award winners. But ideology is *boring*. In the end, what I want when I read science fiction is something that's going to make me say "wow!", with a story that isn't predictable and characters that seem like real (if perhaps quirky) people and ideas that make me go "Hmm." Heinlein managed that for me, as do writers like Vernor Vinge, Ken MacLeod, and Neal Stephenson. Too many other "Libertarian" or "right-wing" authors don't. If you're going to turn it into an ideological tract with cardboard characters spouting ideological talking points, or just another by-the-numbers space opera where manly men of the finest cardboard kill lots of mooks while spouting pretentious jargon... YAWN.
This is pretty much my calculation. I don't swap glasses, I use progressive bifocals (the newer ones which have multiple focus zones rather than being totally continuous so that you can pretty much always have your workpiece in focus). Even if my vision without glasses was 20-20, I'd still need progressive bifocals, since I need multiple focal points to deal with my daily work (focus point for viewing computer monitor, focus point for viewing iDevice in my hand, focus point for viewing the speedometer in my car, focus point for dealing with tiny screws in computer cases, etc.). Given that, what's the point? I still end up needing glasses, I just add a bit of needless risk to the equation too.
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Yet the Mac survived despite similarly being a proprietary design, it wasn't until Windows 95 came out that the Mac became technically inferior -- MacOS 8 and Windows 3.1 were pretty comparable technically, but Windows 95 had real multitasking and while it crashed a lot, so did MacOS 8.
The reality is that Commodore was mismanaged was mismanaged from the day Tramiel left. I doubt Tramiel could have done much better -- see his track record at Atari -- but he was replaced by idiots who had no idea how to run a computer company.
Disclaimer: I interviewed at Commodore as an engineer in early 1991. The product they were working on at the time was the CDTV. Just looking at the prototype I could see no point to it -- it was too expensive for the big box retailers to sell as a game console, and at the time they weren't interested in selling computers (this was before you could walk into Walmart and buy a PC). I ended up going elsewhere and adventuring in non-computer-related fields for a while before getting back into computing with Linux in 1995, releasing our first commercial product for Linux in June 1996 (a school administration package ported from SCO Unix and which we sold as part and parcel of an administrative solution to school districts including computers, terminals, and administrative software). Linux brought the fun back into computing that died with the 1980's, it was an adventure there in the late 90's. Now it's just a job, but I'm older and okay with that.
The C64 was basically the Arduino of its day. For budding hardware hackers, it had lots of parallel I/O pins right there on the back of the computer, accessible with a simple card connector. I controlled a calibration oven for directional drilling probes with the thing in the late 1980's, using a custom BASIC program to run the analog to digital converters via bit-banging pins on the CIA (the parallel I/O chip). I also used it for a weather radar system used on offshore oil rigs, that one was mostly 6502 assembly code and again bit-banging data on the CIA. The computer came with a complete hardware schematic that basically encouraged doing things like this. I even designed my own cards to plug into the "cartridge port" for doing various things.
Yeah, it sucked as a computer. But it was a hardware hacker's dream toy. There wasn't anything like it ever again until the Arduinos and Raspberry Pi arrived around 2010 or so.
No it didn't. You could replace ROM libraries with disk-based libraries without a problem at system boot. The only libraries that had to be in the ROM were the disk libraries (else you couldn't load libraries off of disk, duh) and even there, you could replace them after boot. There was a standard API call to get a library handle, that API call didn't care where the library lived, whether disk or ROM, it looked on disk first, and only then did it look for the library in ROM. In fact, workbench.library lived on disk in the very last Amiga 4000 variant because there wasn't enough room in the ROM for it. That said, in the days before systems with 96 gigabytes of RAM, replacing a ROM to upgrade your version of AmigaOS made more sense than using precious RAM to hold copies of libraries. Remember, large numbers of Amigas only had 1 megabyte of memory (I had to scrimp and save to buy a 4 megabyte board for my Amiga 2000) and most never even had hard drives.... I did add an 80 megabyte (!) SCSI hard drive to my Amiga 2000, but the drive plus controller cost almost as much as the computer at the time.
Windows 95 wasn't any worse from a customer point of view than the Amiga. Both crashed regularly for the same reason -- lack of memory protection. The Amiga was the only pre-emptive multitasking consumer OS before Windows 95 (I don't consider OS/2 to be a consumer OS, its hardware requirements were far higher than a consumer OS, it was a business workstation OS). Once Windows 95 brought that to the Windows world, there was literally no reason for the Amiga to exist anymore -- everything it could do, Windows 95 could do, maybe not as elegantly but for a much lower price.
Thus why the Amiga technology basically died with Commodore -- oh sure, various companies bought the intellectual property over the years, but none of them invested any money in it to bring out new computers. There just wasn't any business logic to doing so in a world that contained Windows 95.
Exactly. So why do you recite a valid criticism of FileVault1, which had exactly the problems you mentioned due to it being layered as a DMG on an unencrypted filesystem, as if it applied to FileVault2, which is an *entirely different technology*?
Once upon a time, like ten years ago, File Vault encrypted home folders as a dmg file on a partition. That is no longer the case and has not been the case for years. File Vault doesn't work like that anymore, and it hasn't worked like that for years. Now it's whole disk encryption like Microsoft's Bitlocker, and utterly bulletproof. The only way to lose your disk is to overwrite the key blocks at the start of the disk.
Technology moves on, man.
I still have most of the Commodore 64 code that I ever wrote, even though the computers are sitting in my brother's attic 2,000 miles from here and the disks are long gone. As I've upgraded platforms I've pulled in my files from the previous platforms, and now we have emulators so I could even run the programs again if I wished. This obviously isn't going to help with things that had a hardware component like my card for interfacing a Commodore 64 with a 1571 disk drive at full 1571 speed (wire-wrapped, naturally, and using a ROM simulator SRAM chip to hold my code), but (shrug). The whole need for that is really not there anymore since a simulated 1541 is ridiculously faster than the real thing was.
I would use an Arduino board with a Bluetooth adapter to do all the grunt work, and use the (Android) smartphone just for the user interface, talking to the Arduino via a Serial profile. We do something like that in ham radio nowadays to interface APRS with Android tablets, with the Android tablet providing GPS coordinates to be outputted as ham radio packets to the APRS system, and accepting GPS coordinates sent via packet radio from the ham-radio-interfaced Arduino to display the call signs of surrounding ham radio stations on the Android tablet's display . (Can't do it with iDevices because Apple won't open up access to the Serial profile).
The capacitors are easy to replace. The chips are fat and happy NMOS that are somewhat static sensitive but otherwise pretty indestructible. The big problem with the chips is the 6526 CIA, which is the parallel port chip that is likely interfaced with the balancer machine. Those tend to pop if you stare at them wrong because the raw digital lines go directly from the CIA pins to that port on the back with no (zero) buffering, and it's been quite a while since they were manufactured. I used to pop them all the time when interfacing my wire-wrapped gadgets to my Commodore 64 and our local Commodore repair center knew me by name and when I came in the door immediately went in the back and got a 6526 out of his tubes of spares to sell to me. That was, of course, thirty years ago. Today they can still be found on eBay as pulls from recycled machines, but with the normal caveats of buying recycled components from eBay -- i.e.,. most of the time the seller has no way of testing them, so what you get may or may not work.
Err, no. The SID chip is on the motherboard of the Commodore 64 (the schematic is even in the technical manual -- want to see my copy?) and is mixed with the television signal out the RF port on the back, or is available as a pin on the 8-pin round audio-video connector on the back of the Commodore 64, from whence it can go into a 1702 monitor (via an 8-pin to 8-pin cable) or broken out and sent to a powered speaker (via an 8-pin to RCA breakout cable, which also allowed hooking to a normal composite monitor). The 1541 has nothing to do with sound.
Back in the day, the Commodore 64 was often used for industrial applications like this where the cosmetics of having a trash computer were outweighed by the cost savings of using a common off-the-shelf piece of hardware that had a bunch of easily controlled digital I/O lines hanging out on a card edge connector on the back. In the late 80's I had a contract to write software to display weather radar on a C-64 screen where the resulting consoles were deployed on offshore oil rigs talking back to the homeland over 1200 baud radio modems. I also had a contract to do the heat and magnetic calibration on directional drilling probes, where the signals from the drilling probe went through an analog to digital converter and were then bit-banged in over the parallel port lines on a Commodore 64.
Today I'd probably use something like an Arduino for things like that. But that of course didn't exist back then.
Tell that to the arbiter who is being paid by the Big Bank to arbitrate your case :).
You can bet that these contracts have forced arbitration in them -- you must agree to forced arbitration, or you don't get your severance pay. Because that's how evil banks roll.
So why is that bad? Well, consumers win 40% of the time when they sue a bank in court. But if a consumer instead is forced into arbitration because of a forced arbitration clause in the contract, consumers win less than 4% of the time, according to a study of arbitration decisions in California. I.e., forced arbitration basically means you signed away your right to sue in any meaningful way -- and the Supreme Court has upheld those agreements as fair and reasonable, so you can't even appeal to a "real" court.
Apple gave fair warning to vendors that they wanted sandboxed applications to be the standard for the platform. Sandboxed applications do not run out of system directories, they are basically "jailed" in their own sandboxes. Microsoft, like most software vendors, ignored Apple. So now the vendors are reaping the rewards of what they sowed.
The bigger problem with El Capitan lies with virtualization and VPN software. These need to make changes to the system routing and interface tables to properly route packets between virtual machines and the Internet, or between the local host and the other end of a VPN tunnel. El Capitan breaks our VPN at work and I have advised our employees to not upgrade to El Capitan due to this fact until Apple and VPN vendors come up with a solution to this problem. I certainly am not going to advise employees on how to disable Apple's security system (SIP), that would be lunacy on my part akin to telling employees how to disable virus protection on their Windows laptops given the increasing threat level for Macs recently.
In the end, we need more secure systems, and Apple is providing one. The fact that it breaks existing applications and inconveniences users is unsurprising. It would have been surprising if that *hadn't* happened -- which is one reason why consumer operating systems are so insecure (because making them secure breaks so much stuff).
Yep. Microwave fade. It's inherent in ultra high wavelength transmissions. That said, we have modulation techniques today that have effective error correction, unlike back in the day when this was all done with FM and you ended up losing data when you had poor conditions. Think about how your mobile phone gets massive bandwidth and reliability out of OFDMA (LTE's downlink technology) under much worse propagation conditions in city canyons, and scale that to microwave frequencies.
That said, given the bandwidth limitations of long distance microwave technology and improvements in fiber technology over the past five years, it seems to me that this is a solution whose problem is already on the way out. NTT has fiber that can transmit 69.1 tbit/sec over a 240km distance. Out here in the West you can put towers on top of mountains to get line of sight for that long of a distance, but practically speaking you won't get line of sight for more than 100km or so in the flatlands without an enormously tall and expensive tower. The network between Chicago and NYC mentioned in the paper has towers every 70km and runs at 400mbit/sec. Clearly fiber can do that distance, and with much better bandwidth.
The Central Valley of California is sitting on rich topsoil over 100 feet deep. Before the modern water projects, it mostly grew winter wheat, because there's enough moisture in winter (the rainy season in California) for that in most years. The Central Valley is technically a Mediterranean climate, not a desert (though the southern part of the Valley is technically semi-desert). But the water projects made it profitable and possible to grow crops year-round rather than just in the winter, mining that 100 feet of topsoil for food. Telling people they can't mine a resource like that doesn't go down well with Americans, who tend to be an ornery sort.
An example is almonds. Almonds now use close to 10% of water used in California. One almond takes approximately 1.1 gallons of water to create it.
So: Why, in the midst of drought, are California farmers planting *more* almonds? The answer, paradoxically, is because water has become more expensive. The water projects are not delivering water to California farmers, so California farmers have a choice between a) not growing crops (and thereby losing their farm, since no crops means they can't pay the mortgages they took out on their farm equipment and/or farmland to expand in earlier more optimistic times), or b) drilling wells. Drilling wells that in some cases are a thousand feet or more deep. The water from these wells is ridiculously expensive for two reasons: 1) the simple cost of drilling, and 2) the large amount of electricity needed to haul that water (at 8 pounds per gallon) up that 1,000+ feet of pipe to the surface.
In fact, the water from these wells is so expensive that if the farmers used it to grow a low-water-use crop like wheat they'd lose money. Most low-water-use crops like wheat or corn have a relatively low price on the commodities market, a price that will not pay for the cost of the well and the electricity to pump water out of the well. So, paradoxically, expensive water has caused farmers to instead grow almonds -- one of the only crops that sell for a higher price than the cost of the water needed to grow them, yet also one of the most water-thirsty crops on the planet.
And now you know the side of the story you don't get from the Libertarian free market think tanks and their notion that expensive water would cause water usage by farmers to decline. What matters to farmers is *not* the absolute cost of the water. What matters to the farmers is the *marginal* cost of the water -- the difference between what it costs to obtain the water, and what income they get from using the water. When water was cheap but in limited supply, farmers grew crops that were water-thrifty because the price of those commodities was enough to pay for the water. Now that water is expensive but they can pump as much as they wish from the ground (until the aquifer runs dry, anyhow!), the California farmer's slogan becomes "drill, baybee, drill!" and the almond trees go in.
Actually, 65% of rich people in the United States (defined as the top 1% of income level) were born rich, according to the latest report I read on intergenerational income mobility in the United States. The only resources or intelligence they were ever required to exercise were to call Daddy when they needed more money. In my experience they're not stupid, but the documentary "Born Rich" probably gives you a good sense of the bubble they're born and raised in and its effects on them.
Just as with the AMT now hitting middle class families, current US tax policy against expatriates merely uses rich people as an excuse to be abusive towards middle class expatriates. Truly rich expatriates don't make money income (their income is investment income typically "earned" in the United States) so are not subject to this insanity.
It is always wise to distinguish between the propaganda used to pass a law, and the actual effects and purpose of the law.
People whose field is IT tend to have children whose field is IT. And while the world is large, the SF Bay area is still the center of the technology startup world. The amount of money invested in SF Bay area technology startups every year by venture capitalists is greater than the amount of money they invest in technology in the entire rest of the world. While I agree that you can be a sysadmin anywhere, if you want to work on game-changing technology there's a mouth-drooling variety of possibilities in the SF Bay Area. I resisted moving to the SF Bay Area for years, but there's just too much cool stuff going on here to move away again.
I do not know these specific children so I have no idea if they have any desire to create leading-edge technology in the future. If they don't, US citizenship is just trouble. If they do, however, US citizenship opens up interesting vistas in one of the few places in the United States that isn't turning into a seedy dump.
As you say, the big advantage to having US citizenship is if they go into technology and want to work in Silicon Valley. No worries about green cards, H1B, etc., just move there and go to work.
The big disadvantage is taxes. But boy, what a disadvantage. It's like the US is trying to build a Berlin Wall around the USA to keep people in. Makes you wonder what our leaders know that we don't know about where our country is going.
Regarding renouncing citizenship, that isn't as difficult or expensive as described above, but if not done right you can be arrested for tax evasion if you ever set foot on US soil again -- even if just transiting to another country, such as flying from Paris to Toronto (which has a stopover in New York City). Ask Maher Arar about that one...
Yes, NetworkManager should be fine on most servers. Unless you want to use network bonding. And VLANs. And bridges. Nevermind bridged VLAN's (yes, those are a thing) on top of 802.3Ad bonds. And ... and... well, 90% of the other functionality that is offered by the Linux networking stack. NetworkManager works fine for managing the 10% of the network stack that is used 90% of the time. For the other 10% of the time, it is an abortion that should be taken out back of the barn and shot like a rabid dog. And this other 10% that NetworkManager won't do is 99% of why people pay me big bucks to make Linux do what they need it to do, since you will not get high performance networking out of a server using the limited functionality provided by NetworkManager. As in, the servers I work with generally have at least half a dozen gigabit NICs and two 10Gbit NIC's. NetworkManager won't get me 1/10th of what I need to put these servers into the midst of a large network for use in server consolidation, and is utterly useless once we start talking about Open vSwitch and other such SDN components.
So sure, if you're a sandwich shop putting a $500 server under the cash register, or you are a teenage college student setting up a video sharing network for your bro's in the flop house you board in, NetworkManager will work fine for you. For those of us doing anything more complex, it is a useless abomination and the first thing done when bringing up a new server image is "chkconfig NetworkManager off ; service NetworkManager stop". (Or the AbominationD equivalents thereof).
In fact, they are expanding it -- they are putting in a brand new data center on the site that was the former Counterpane Security, on LaAvenida across from their SV HQ, and they also have leased a huge building a couple of blocks away on Pear Street. There's also rumors that they're behind the demolishing of an entire block of tilt-ups between LaAvenida and Pear to be replaced by six-story office buildings. In any event Microsoft isn't leaving the Silicon Valley, just Microsoft Research is leaving -- all fifty employees. Every single one of them who can have a job tomorrow by walking down the street to the Googleplex. Not a single one of whom have ever created a product for Microsoft, because Microsoft doesn't create products anymore, they just re-invent other people's products (or their own previously-good products), badly.
You're actually talking about MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks), a technology that I first encountered in 2002. Now-bankrupt Copan Systems was the company I first encountered that was doing MAID, and New SGI (i.e. former Rackable Systems) bought their assets out of bankruptcy in 2010. Most storage companies now offer MAID add-ons for their storage arrays, though not all of them allow completely powering down the drive like Copan's solution did.
The upsides of MAID: Disks are cheap. Turning on and spinning up a hard drive to pull up some bits is faster than a robot fetching a Blu-Ray disk, placing it into a drive in the jukebox, and waiting for the disk to spin up and come online. You could store many more bytes in a cabinet with MAID than you could in an optical disk cabinet.
Downsides: The disk drives in a MAID array simply don't last that long, comparatively speaking. Spinning them up and down all the time is hard on a drive. So you end up having to replicate data and from time to time migrate data to new drives as old drives reach their service life. The service life of rarely used Blu-Ray media that has always been handled robotically (i.e., nothing touching its surfaces ever) is such that Blu-Ray media from ten years ago is probably still usable, the technology itself will become obsolete like DVD-RAM long before the media wears out. Not so much with hard drives, though disk arrays basically have unlimited life given typical failure patterns (i.e., if you're using RAID6, a drive develops errors, you remove the failing drive from the array, rebuild the array on a new drive, and chances of having two more drives fail during rebuild and thus losing the array are slim for a 12-drive array). So MAID has not really taken off the way we expected ten years ago.
At the time I first encountered MAID I was working for a company called DISC Storage, which had a NAS head which would automatically migrate little-used data to an optical jukebox in a way similar to what Facebook appears to be attempting. I designed and implemented the clustering function that would replicate the data between two NAS heads / optical jukeboxes, since the DVD-RAM platters were not themselves RAID'ed, as well as implemented a lot of the back end functionality for jukebox control and so forth. In any event, it looked like a NAS head but most of the files had been migrated to the DVD-RAM platters, and if you accessed one of those files, you would (at some point maybe 15 seconds later) get your data back as the file got read back onto the hard drive. It worked. But it was somewhat slow and cumbersome, because you're relying on a robot to go out and fetch the disk and put it in a drive, and disk robots then, and now, simply aren't that fast compared to media that's already in a drive ready to be spun up and read.
So anyhow, it was fairly obvious to me by mid 2003 that optical jukeboxes simply weren't going to be the future. In the ten years since DISC went under (there is a German company by that name now but it isn't the same company, it bought the name and some of the IP), I have not had any inclination to work for a company doing optical storage, because it's clear that for most problems it isn't the solution. It's too slow, too bulky, and magnetic disk drives and magnetic tape drives just continue getting bigger and cheaper every day. And now, with SSD coming on strong, optical jukeboxes look even less compelling.
So color me amazed. Optical jukebox and optical media technology essentially has barely moved on in the past ten years and what wasn't particularly compelling then, is even less compelling now. If you have need to keep data for a *long* time, this is how you do it... but frankly, I will be surprised if Facebook even exists ten years from now given the pace of innovation in the industry (though I'm just as surprised that Slashdot still exists!), so I question why they would do this rather than invest in LTO tape libraries, which have the advantage of being significantly denser.
Orson Scott Card is proof that ideology doesn't stop you from winning Hugos. All that is necessary is to write something interesting and mind-blowing. Writing formulatic space operas that are basically 1950's Don Pendleton manly war-fighting men set in space rather than in the wilds of darkest Africa or Southeast Asia is not the sort of thing that gathers awards, those have been done so many times that they're mind candy, something entertaining if in a certain mood but hardly mind blowing. Neither are fifteen page dissertations on why Libertarianism is the only proper ideology for running a space station. Nobody wants an ideological tract when they read science fiction, they want to have their mind blown. Orson Scott Card's later books haven't won Hugos not because of his right wing ideology, but, rather, because they've been boring, having nothing new to offer over his earlier fiction that did win awards. Which is a shame, because his 80's output was ridiculously good, then he got full of himself and his output got boring.
I liked Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as a work of fiction, and probably would have nominated it for an award that year if I hadn't been 2 years old at the time. L. Neil Smith's work, on the other hand, read like Libertarian tracts with cardboard characters and stereotypical plots, I read a couple of them and was, like, "meh", even though at the time I considered myself somewhat Libertarian and liked a number of other Prometheus Award winners. But ideology is *boring*. In the end, what I want when I read science fiction is something that's going to make me say "wow!", with a story that isn't predictable and characters that seem like real (if perhaps quirky) people and ideas that make me go "Hmm." Heinlein managed that for me, as do writers like Vernor Vinge, Ken MacLeod, and Neal Stephenson. Too many other "Libertarian" or "right-wing" authors don't. If you're going to turn it into an ideological tract with cardboard characters spouting ideological talking points, or just another by-the-numbers space opera where manly men of the finest cardboard kill lots of mooks while spouting pretentious jargon... YAWN.
This is pretty much my calculation. I don't swap glasses, I use progressive bifocals (the newer ones which have multiple focus zones rather than being totally continuous so that you can pretty much always have your workpiece in focus). Even if my vision without glasses was 20-20, I'd still need progressive bifocals, since I need multiple focal points to deal with my daily work (focus point for viewing computer monitor, focus point for viewing iDevice in my hand, focus point for viewing the speedometer in my car, focus point for dealing with tiny screws in computer cases, etc.). Given that, what's the point? I still end up needing glasses, I just add a bit of needless risk to the equation too.