All of these are command line tools. If you're a GUI type and shy away from command line, BSD's are not for you (yet).
I'm a best-UI-for-the-job type who's at home in a CLI but doesn't turn down a good, functional GUI when one exists.
The Debian tool I'm a big fan of, aptitude, is a Ncurses based "TUI" package manager. (http://screenshots.debian.net/package/aptitude if you can't picture it) Synaptic is pretty much the same thing with a few more features in GTK form. These make it far easier to resolve package conflicts and such compared to the straight CLI tools.
It's not a major loss in a production system where the packages needed are known and mostly unchanging, but for personal machines where I install things I want to play with on a whim a good interface to actually browse the available packages is key.
Speaking of anecdotes, a trend that I've noticed is that linux fans will tend to use FreeBSD when it makes sense in a particular application, and FreeBSD fans will tend to use linux when hell freezes over.
This is me. I have tried numerous times to use FreeBSD as my home server OS and a few times as my desktop dual-boot, but always end up getting frustrated. Usually it's application management, as any of my home *nix boxes are used for experimentation with lots of stuff being installed and removed. I'm just so used to tools like aptitude and Synaptic that anything less pisses me off, and after a few days to weeks at most I end up reinstalling something from the Debian family tree. Same problem actually tends to happen with Red Hat style Linuxes, there doesn't seem to be an "aptitude" equal for the RPM world.
I use a FreeBSD-ish userland daily in the form of OS X, but don't usually have to deal with shitty management of *nix applications thanks to many having proper OS X.app packages available. Beyond that "homebrew" seems to be the current favorite analog to the "average" *nix packaging tools.
But my router/firewall has been FreeBSD for over a decade now, once m0n0wall but these days its more featureful derivative pfSense. pf is just superior to iptables. These things are rock solid and almost any change can be made online without affecting existing traffic, which is more than I can say for every Linux-based router/firewall I've used.
People still enjoy 50-year-old movies. Why is a video game necessarily "expired milk" just because it's five years old?
They're not always, but remember that many games don't have much of a story beyond a basic framework designed to push you through the various parts of the game. When a newer game comes along in the same genre, the old ones tend to be left behind unless they had something that made them important.
The original Wolfenstein, Doom, and Duke Nukem will probably be played forever since they were the defining titles of the FPS genre. The most recent releases in any of those lines, probably not. Need For Speed 3 showed the world that running from the cops was something we all secretly wanted to do in a no-consequences environment. Its official sequel in the twisty Need For Speed line, Hot Pursuit 2, is all but forgotten.
Multiplayer can play with this in both directions, lengthening the lives of some games while shortening others. A shitty game with fun multiplayer, particularly if its cheap/free/easy to pirate, can live on for years as long as the servers stay populated. A great game that's been abandoned by its players for something else, likewise, can die off rapidly. There's a critical mass required for multiplayer to keep the game healthy, and that's where a player who's just looking to play can find a game that roughly approximates what they wanted to play with enough other players to actually enjoy it. Fall below that level and you quickly enter a death spiral as those who are still playing find themselves more and more often without a game.
Basically in 10 years I still see myself firing up Halo or Borderlands if the hardware available to me allows it, as I liked the story. The existence of sequels or "better" titles in the genre doesn't matter, since they won't be the story I want. That's comparable to a movie.
I probably won't, however, be firing up Forza Motorsport 3. As a sim title with no real storyline beyond completing a set series of races for a "Career", FM4 improved upon it in all ways leaving no reason to back up.
Agreed and agreed, it is awesome and it is a better simulation.
Whether or not it's a better game however is debatable. Forza I think is a better *game* because they've managed to strike a balance where the game still strives for accurate simulation, but lets you use that simulation to do absurd things. You can go from a serious Le Mans-style race using some of the best real race cars of the past 60 years to a game of figure eight drift chicken on the Top Gear test track with fire-spitting 599XXes dodging 800 HP rotary Miatas without even leaving the lobby.
No other game offers the variety of customization while still remaining as realistic as possible. There's practically zero chance that iRacing, PCARS, or any of the other big names in PC racing will let me build a LS7 Fiero in-game any time soon. The GMC Vandura that "just happened" to offer a body kit to match the A-Team van. The ability to downgrade a Mustang Cobra R to look like a base V6 model. The fricking Ford Transit. The other games either take themselves too seriously or just go full arcade. Give me a good simulation engine, then give me game modes that encourage hooning when I'm in the mood rather than just striving for racing perfection.
I'm really not happy with Microsoft over the in-house push for some of the Xbone's less well received features seems to have impacted FM5, I was really hoping for another good game but I think I'm sitting this one out. With the moon lander stuff it seems like Polyphony may have developed a slight sense of humor so I'm considering dusting off the ol' PS3 for some GT6 action.
You are entirely correct, but you seem to have missed the point. FEC at layer 3 is intended to handle the fact that some layer 2 networks are broken or unreliable and neither we users nor Google or any other content provider have any control over that.
Sometimes you're on a 25,000' above-ground DSL line that stretches in the heat of the sun and sends the SNR to hell. Sometimes the WiFi AP is just a bit further away than you'd want. Sometimes you're on a cell phone or other mobile data connection traveling down the highway (as a passenger of course), all the while changing signal conditions force mode changes and sometimes radio changes, not to mention tower handoffs.
In any of those cases think of how frustrating it is when your signal fades and you're stuck waiting as the important document and/or cat video you were downloading gets tossed in to turtle mode by a few lost packets. You have no control over the layer 2 shittiness, be it provider profit calculations or physics getting in the way the choices are either suck it up or deal with it elsewhere. In this case they decided that the latter may be beneficial.
I figure if you can afford the 200+ mph car, you don't give a shit about the cost of tires.
Just for the record, 200 MPH is not the unobtanium supercar-only barrier it once was. A base model last-generation Corvette is the standard set of bolt-ons (intake, headers, exhaust) away from 200 MPH. A current model Mustang GT500 will do it stock. No joke, a $55,000 Mustang today is fully capable of reaching speeds only the greatest Ferraris and Lamborghinis of the day could touch just a decade or two ago.
I can imagine plenty of GT500 owners who still certainly care about the cost of tires, and probably quite a few who are hurting over that as-is given the inevitable appetite for rear tires I can only imagine a nearly 700 horsepower Mustang would have.
What GP is describing isn't a plain bluetooth adapter, but a device that exposes itself on USB as a standard USB Audio headset device and then speaks Bluetooth HSP and/or A2DP on the air. I'm not sure if such a thing exists currently, but it would not be rocket science to create if Sony provides a market by not supporting Bluetooth natively.
You are correct that it's a 2.5mm jack, but it's not all that uncommon. It's also the standard headset connector on any cordless phone I've ever seen as well as a number of desktop phones. The Linksys/Cisco SPA series are the first ones off the top of my head. My FRS/GMRS radios also have the same connector.
Everyone's already jumped on you on this one, but I still have to chime in and say holy crap are you ever wrong if you think a SSD is not worth every dime right now.
You don't need *everything* to be on SSD, just the commonly-used data; your system, binaries, etc. I have a 120GB Intel 330 series SSD (though in hindsight I'd rather have gone with something ~250GB and 2TB of normal spinning disk, plus a 7TB server. The system, my home directory (minus downloads directory), and my main games are on the SSD, the rest of my games are on a 1.5TB 7200 RPM disk, and downloads get an old 500GB disk. My machine spends more time in POST than the entire rest of the boot process, browsers launch instantly, IDEs take half a second, games practically skip their own loading screens, etc.
Unless you place no value on your time, in any interactively-operated machine where you can have multiple storage drives a SSD is a no-brainer. Laptops where a second disk is challenging or impossible it entirely depends on your mobile storage needs, but the reduction of moving parts and performance/battery improvements are a strong argument in favor of them.
How in the hell are WiFi networks not "radio communications" which are "readily accessible"? What fucked up, distorted logic led to this?
I hope I don't have to explain how they are radio communications, if that's not obvious to anyone please go play with crayons in the corner.
As for readily accessible, when the vast majority of WiFi-equipped PCs and most mobile devices need nothing more than software which simply asks the wireless card to pass through what it sees, uh yes, it is readily accessible.
It's like arguing that since FRS radios typically default to channels 1 or 14 when turned on, channel 6 is not readily accessible. Sure you don't get it without asking, but its about as easy as it could possibly be.
Eh, never having a need to enter a URL manually is not really a badge of pride on a technical website. Maybe it is an indication of the type of people reading Slashdot these days, though!
What? Computers are made to automate things. That's their point, they can do repetitive things really fast and usually better than we meatbags can. Taking pride in "doing it the hard way" is just pure idiocy if the result is the same. Sometimes that's not the case, the hard way is actually better, but we're talking about URL autocomplete here. There's no fine art to domain names.
I wouldn't call it a "badge of pride" unless you were one of the people implementing the feature in the browser, but to act like not having to manually enter domain (which is very different from not being capable of doing so) is any knock against one's geekiness is just stupid.
I *can* read tcpdump verbose text output quite well and do so at least a few times a month when reasons come together to require it, but given the choice I'll always fire up Wireshark and let the computer do the work while I focus on what I'm actually trying to accomplish. Does that make me less suited for Slashdot in your opinion since I wouldn't pointlessly pick the hard way?
I also drive a manual, so I couldn't use a phone without it in the car even if I wanted to. I've done it a few times, the results were hilarious, if almost hitting pedestrians on the sidewalk is your version of hilarious.
Hey now, it's not that hard. Both of my cars are manual, but only one has Bluetooth. Hold the phone in your left hand (presuming you're in a LHD country) and plan your shifts to avoid needing them mid-corner (which is something you should be doing anyways.
That said the Bluetooth is a lot nicer. I don't talk and drive often (unlike apparently most I pay more attention to the road than the other party, requiring a lot of repeated information and usually resulting in them deciding to call back later). I'd be all for requiring hands-free whenever driving, but I'm not sure how many cell phone related accidents actually involved the phone in the hand being a factor rather than the driver spacing out on their driving while they focus on the call.
As an administrator, giving network access to black hats by failing to block access SSH access to sensitive systems from unknown IP space just shows you are an idiot.
The part you're missing is that the concern here isn't unknown IP space for the most part. There are probably very few of these things actually exposed to the whole internet, and I agree that the people responsible for any that are need a good smacking. The concern is malicious users or code running within your network. Most networks fit the candy analogy, i.e. hard shell, soft insides. There may be decent external security but once you're inside the perimeter you often have open access to everything.
As someone else said, this is about the geeky mail clerk who is pissed about something and wants to make an impact when he leaves. An easily accessible backdoor like this could make such an attack nearly untraceable.
Sounds like you need a better security director, a better firewall/network infra admin, and some junior guy to read logs and watch the seim. The better question here is how/why was this device able to tunnel in/out of your network without someone explicitly allowing it? What you allow unfiltered egress from your data center? If you do your vendors are the least of your problems.
Reading helps...
There were other reasons their software needed to connect to them so they just used the same port to allow their support techs to have basically more access than I, the senior administrator had.
It's not hard to tunnel pretty much anything over anything else, particularly when encryption is involved. If your whatsit speaks a proprietary binary protocol or even just uses encryption in a reasonable way and has a legitimate reason to connect to outside sites, you don't really have a good way to know what exactly it's doing with that connection.
Of course it doesn't use the Play Store. It's not meant as a general-purpose Android platform (and neither would any Google console). It has to have it's own specialized store. You can't very well have a console loading apps that expect a touch screen, accelerometer, etc. Even if Google let their console use the Play Store, they would have to wall it off into it's own area.
It's not like we really need to speculate, they already have had television-optimized Android devices accessing the Play store officially for over a year and a half in the form of Google TV. This works fine because the Play store allows developers to filter device availability based on hardware capabilities. Android apps are assumed to require a touchscreen unless explicitly declared otherwise, so by default an app will not show up on GTV or presumably any future console. If the application's manifest is adjusted to state that it does not require a touchscreen and it has no other hardware dependencies, it'll show up on anything that can access the store.
No, you still misunderstood. OP was asking for an open + free solution for self hosting, not saying that all their code they wanted to host is open + free.
This was the important part:
At my company we use Git with some private repositories.
The private repositories are key. Those are not open. They may contain code which will eventually be released under an open and/or free license, but they are not currently. OP wants to take those out of "the cloud", using open/free solutions.
Which is done with the reboot option from within the OS, generally. The point was that most computers default to automatically sleeping in a reasonably short time and this has actually worked reliably for the last 5-10 years, so its fairly common to not actually turn a computer entirely off.
My desktop sleeps at five watts. Parasitic draw when entirely off is 1.5 or so. That's just short of 31 kWh in a year. At my electric rates, that means leaving it asleep rather than off for an entire year would add all of $6 to my electric bill. As it's certainly not off/asleep for all that time, the real-world impact is closer to $2-3. Even with a nice SSD, boot is a 30-45 second thing where the longest part of waking from sleep is waiting for my monitors to realize what's happened and turn on.
The cost of a smoothie every year in exchange for convenience every time I return to my computer? Yeah, worth it.
Also, most Mac users don't dual-boot unless they're gaming. VirtualBox works just as well for 95% of uses and adds a lot of features you don't get with bare metal installs like snapshots, plus Parallels and Fusion exist for those with more specific needs who can't get away with VirtualBox. I'll agree that many serious users of Intel Macs run Windows in some form, but the dual boot versus virtualized split has been shifting more and more towards virtualized over the years.
It's worth noting that mobile devices often decode popular compressed audio and video formats in dedicated hardware. Modern, powerful devices can play audio and sometimes video reliably in software, but they use a lot more battery power to do so in comparison, so sticking with formats natively supported by your hardware is still usually the best idea.
I think a few chips got Vorbis support and it wouldn't surprise me to find that FLAC made it in to real hardware somewhere, but there's a reason MP3 was basically the only real portable format choice for years.
Because in a lot of cases they own the facilities that print the books. The parts of the business that e-books either render obsolete or reduce the need for are parts where the big companies involved still make money. They see e-books as a threat to that part of their business and thus their profit margins. They've also seen what happened with music, if you are a content producer it's getting easier and easier to bypass most of the middlemen. The "big content" companies are the middlemen, so while I don't think anyone believes they'll win they'd still prefer to drag out the battle as long as possible. Doing anything in their power to reduce the appeal of e-books is part of that strategy.
And it still had major issues until Windows 2012. A few major services could not be used on Core machines, plus there was no way to "upgrade" a Core install to a full GUI or the other way around. Plus Powershell support was not the greatest back when that became available, so managing some of the services that worked fine could still be a chore.
It's nice that Microsoft still tries to build a decent server OS, but they're strung up by the fact that it's still Windows and thus they have to deal with the immense pile of legacy garbage that exists for Windows systems. Microsoft's own services may now all be good in a headless, GUI-less environment, but the third parties are a mess.
The reason *nix systems remain mostly clear of that shit is simply that they never compromised good design for user convenience at the same scale, so pretty much everything written for the platform is built to assume user-level privileges and GUIs being optional. I still to this day have software vendors telling me that their client application that just works with data from a remote system absolutely requires that all users be given Administrator privileges, and then acting like I'm the weird one when I refuse to do so. It's not like NT on the desktop is a new thing, am I unreasonable for expecting actively developed software to have been updated to 2000-era standards by now?
My roommate does the same in his Optima actually, I just picked SD because it seems to be the common choice among OEMs for nav storage these days and in my experience is more durable than USB drives.
I've killed a few USB drives in the course of normal use where while I've heard of them I've never seem an actual dead SD card. I'd expect the actual internal memory to be similar, so I can only imagine the difference comes from the physical form and possibly simpler interface.
And the hundreds of thousands of Chrysler MyGig systems with ordinary 2.5" laptop hard disks contained within are failing in massive quantities, right? Or any number of other manufacturers offering hard disk based storage in their entertainment system. Or the thousands of custom-built in car PCs rigged up by enthusiasts, until recently often equipped with full desktop disks for capacity reasons.
FYI, the "freezer trick" is a common way to coax some last remaining life out of a hard drive that won't spin up. They seem to like the cold, since one that doesn't work at room temperature in my experience has about a 20% chance of coming back to life if frozen. More than once I've rescued data with a USB cord running out from my minifridge.
Or we'll skip the hard drive altogether, SSDs are well under $1/GB for non-performance applications (which media storage in a vehicle certainly fits within). Since when did they care about vibration or the sort of temperatures cars are tested for? Hell, for the role a SD slot would be more than sufficient. Then not only is it practically indestructible media but it's entirely user swappable, allowing easier loading of content and trivial upgrades down the line.
Anyone who's used MyFord Touch or Cadillac Cue for more than a few minutes knows that the idea of these systems being heavily tested is laughable anyways. Supposedly old Sync was nicer and I haven't had any problems with Kia's Sync-derived UVO system, but I haven't used any of the others to really compare.
I can't agree. More times than I can count I've had a question about a local business which I've tried to find an answer to on their web site, something like what their hours are or often restaurant menus, but searching their name only results in a listing on one of the many useless yellow pages type sites. Many of my customers are small one or two person businesses, they'll tell me their email address and it's some random @aol or @hotmail which was clearly their personal account long before the business. It's entirely unprofessional these days to have absolutely zero internet presence and puts them in a position of having an uphill battle for me to respect them as a business.
It's not rocket science to have a domain with email and a basic web site. It's trivial to get a domain and the absolute minimum level of hosting required for such things, why people consider it acceptable to not do this I can't understand.
I had one of those too, the Timex DataLink series. It depended on the CRT flickering to perform a one-way sync of basic PIM data. This of course didn't work on LCDs or systems like NT where the level of control over the display Timex needed was unavailable, so they also had a serial-based gizmo that flashed a LED to do the same job.
I got mine in 1998 or so and used it as a watch until the plastic body of the watch fell apart some time in 2004. The PIM function hadn't been usable to me for a few years as I'd switched to NT in XP form when it came out, but I'd had a Palm m100 since 2001 so that wasn't really a big deal.
I'd like a modern take on the smart watch, even after getting the Palm I liked having a basic info set available wherever I went. A good "home screen" could put a lot of useful information at a glance without needing to pull your device out of your pocket. Calendar, incoming messages, caller ID, etc. I could see being very useful. Give it an e-paper display for massive battery life and I'm interested.
Slashdot Mirror
All of these are command line tools. If you're a GUI type and shy away from command line, BSD's are not for you (yet).
I'm a best-UI-for-the-job type who's at home in a CLI but doesn't turn down a good, functional GUI when one exists.
The Debian tool I'm a big fan of, aptitude, is a Ncurses based "TUI" package manager. (http://screenshots.debian.net/package/aptitude if you can't picture it) Synaptic is pretty much the same thing with a few more features in GTK form. These make it far easier to resolve package conflicts and such compared to the straight CLI tools.
It's not a major loss in a production system where the packages needed are known and mostly unchanging, but for personal machines where I install things I want to play with on a whim a good interface to actually browse the available packages is key.
Speaking of anecdotes, a trend that I've noticed is that linux fans will tend to use FreeBSD when it makes sense in a particular application, and FreeBSD fans will tend to use linux when hell freezes over.
This is me. I have tried numerous times to use FreeBSD as my home server OS and a few times as my desktop dual-boot, but always end up getting frustrated. Usually it's application management, as any of my home *nix boxes are used for experimentation with lots of stuff being installed and removed. I'm just so used to tools like aptitude and Synaptic that anything less pisses me off, and after a few days to weeks at most I end up reinstalling something from the Debian family tree. Same problem actually tends to happen with Red Hat style Linuxes, there doesn't seem to be an "aptitude" equal for the RPM world.
I use a FreeBSD-ish userland daily in the form of OS X, but don't usually have to deal with shitty management of *nix applications thanks to many having proper OS X .app packages available. Beyond that "homebrew" seems to be the current favorite analog to the "average" *nix packaging tools.
But my router/firewall has been FreeBSD for over a decade now, once m0n0wall but these days its more featureful derivative pfSense. pf is just superior to iptables. These things are rock solid and almost any change can be made online without affecting existing traffic, which is more than I can say for every Linux-based router/firewall I've used.
People still enjoy 50-year-old movies. Why is a video game necessarily "expired milk" just because it's five years old?
They're not always, but remember that many games don't have much of a story beyond a basic framework designed to push you through the various parts of the game. When a newer game comes along in the same genre, the old ones tend to be left behind unless they had something that made them important.
The original Wolfenstein, Doom, and Duke Nukem will probably be played forever since they were the defining titles of the FPS genre. The most recent releases in any of those lines, probably not. Need For Speed 3 showed the world that running from the cops was something we all secretly wanted to do in a no-consequences environment. Its official sequel in the twisty Need For Speed line, Hot Pursuit 2, is all but forgotten.
Multiplayer can play with this in both directions, lengthening the lives of some games while shortening others. A shitty game with fun multiplayer, particularly if its cheap/free/easy to pirate, can live on for years as long as the servers stay populated. A great game that's been abandoned by its players for something else, likewise, can die off rapidly. There's a critical mass required for multiplayer to keep the game healthy, and that's where a player who's just looking to play can find a game that roughly approximates what they wanted to play with enough other players to actually enjoy it. Fall below that level and you quickly enter a death spiral as those who are still playing find themselves more and more often without a game.
Basically in 10 years I still see myself firing up Halo or Borderlands if the hardware available to me allows it, as I liked the story. The existence of sequels or "better" titles in the genre doesn't matter, since they won't be the story I want. That's comparable to a movie.
I probably won't, however, be firing up Forza Motorsport 3. As a sim title with no real storyline beyond completing a set series of races for a "Career", FM4 improved upon it in all ways leaving no reason to back up.
Agreed and agreed, it is awesome and it is a better simulation.
Whether or not it's a better game however is debatable. Forza I think is a better *game* because they've managed to strike a balance where the game still strives for accurate simulation, but lets you use that simulation to do absurd things. You can go from a serious Le Mans-style race using some of the best real race cars of the past 60 years to a game of figure eight drift chicken on the Top Gear test track with fire-spitting 599XXes dodging 800 HP rotary Miatas without even leaving the lobby.
No other game offers the variety of customization while still remaining as realistic as possible. There's practically zero chance that iRacing, PCARS, or any of the other big names in PC racing will let me build a LS7 Fiero in-game any time soon. The GMC Vandura that "just happened" to offer a body kit to match the A-Team van. The ability to downgrade a Mustang Cobra R to look like a base V6 model. The fricking Ford Transit. The other games either take themselves too seriously or just go full arcade. Give me a good simulation engine, then give me game modes that encourage hooning when I'm in the mood rather than just striving for racing perfection.
I'm really not happy with Microsoft over the in-house push for some of the Xbone's less well received features seems to have impacted FM5, I was really hoping for another good game but I think I'm sitting this one out. With the moon lander stuff it seems like Polyphony may have developed a slight sense of humor so I'm considering dusting off the ol' PS3 for some GT6 action.
You are entirely correct, but you seem to have missed the point. FEC at layer 3 is intended to handle the fact that some layer 2 networks are broken or unreliable and neither we users nor Google or any other content provider have any control over that.
Sometimes you're on a 25,000' above-ground DSL line that stretches in the heat of the sun and sends the SNR to hell. Sometimes the WiFi AP is just a bit further away than you'd want. Sometimes you're on a cell phone or other mobile data connection traveling down the highway (as a passenger of course), all the while changing signal conditions force mode changes and sometimes radio changes, not to mention tower handoffs.
In any of those cases think of how frustrating it is when your signal fades and you're stuck waiting as the important document and/or cat video you were downloading gets tossed in to turtle mode by a few lost packets. You have no control over the layer 2 shittiness, be it provider profit calculations or physics getting in the way the choices are either suck it up or deal with it elsewhere. In this case they decided that the latter may be beneficial.
I figure if you can afford the 200+ mph car, you don't give a shit about the cost of tires.
Just for the record, 200 MPH is not the unobtanium supercar-only barrier it once was. A base model last-generation Corvette is the standard set of bolt-ons (intake, headers, exhaust) away from 200 MPH. A current model Mustang GT500 will do it stock. No joke, a $55,000 Mustang today is fully capable of reaching speeds only the greatest Ferraris and Lamborghinis of the day could touch just a decade or two ago.
I can imagine plenty of GT500 owners who still certainly care about the cost of tires, and probably quite a few who are hurting over that as-is given the inevitable appetite for rear tires I can only imagine a nearly 700 horsepower Mustang would have.
What GP is describing isn't a plain bluetooth adapter, but a device that exposes itself on USB as a standard USB Audio headset device and then speaks Bluetooth HSP and/or A2DP on the air. I'm not sure if such a thing exists currently, but it would not be rocket science to create if Sony provides a market by not supporting Bluetooth natively.
You are correct that it's a 2.5mm jack, but it's not all that uncommon. It's also the standard headset connector on any cordless phone I've ever seen as well as a number of desktop phones. The Linksys/Cisco SPA series are the first ones off the top of my head. My FRS/GMRS radios also have the same connector.
Everyone's already jumped on you on this one, but I still have to chime in and say holy crap are you ever wrong if you think a SSD is not worth every dime right now.
You don't need *everything* to be on SSD, just the commonly-used data; your system, binaries, etc. I have a 120GB Intel 330 series SSD (though in hindsight I'd rather have gone with something ~250GB and 2TB of normal spinning disk, plus a 7TB server. The system, my home directory (minus downloads directory), and my main games are on the SSD, the rest of my games are on a 1.5TB 7200 RPM disk, and downloads get an old 500GB disk. My machine spends more time in POST than the entire rest of the boot process, browsers launch instantly, IDEs take half a second, games practically skip their own loading screens, etc.
Unless you place no value on your time, in any interactively-operated machine where you can have multiple storage drives a SSD is a no-brainer. Laptops where a second disk is challenging or impossible it entirely depends on your mobile storage needs, but the reduction of moving parts and performance/battery improvements are a strong argument in favor of them.
How in the hell are WiFi networks not "radio communications" which are "readily accessible"? What fucked up, distorted logic led to this?
I hope I don't have to explain how they are radio communications, if that's not obvious to anyone please go play with crayons in the corner.
As for readily accessible, when the vast majority of WiFi-equipped PCs and most mobile devices need nothing more than software which simply asks the wireless card to pass through what it sees, uh yes, it is readily accessible.
It's like arguing that since FRS radios typically default to channels 1 or 14 when turned on, channel 6 is not readily accessible. Sure you don't get it without asking, but its about as easy as it could possibly be.
Eh, never having a need to enter a URL manually is not really a badge of pride on a technical website. Maybe it is an indication of the type of people reading Slashdot these days, though!
What? Computers are made to automate things. That's their point, they can do repetitive things really fast and usually better than we meatbags can. Taking pride in "doing it the hard way" is just pure idiocy if the result is the same. Sometimes that's not the case, the hard way is actually better, but we're talking about URL autocomplete here. There's no fine art to domain names.
I wouldn't call it a "badge of pride" unless you were one of the people implementing the feature in the browser, but to act like not having to manually enter domain (which is very different from not being capable of doing so) is any knock against one's geekiness is just stupid.
I *can* read tcpdump verbose text output quite well and do so at least a few times a month when reasons come together to require it, but given the choice I'll always fire up Wireshark and let the computer do the work while I focus on what I'm actually trying to accomplish. Does that make me less suited for Slashdot in your opinion since I wouldn't pointlessly pick the hard way?
I also drive a manual, so I couldn't use a phone without it in the car even if I wanted to. I've done it a few times, the results were hilarious, if almost hitting pedestrians on the sidewalk is your version of hilarious.
Hey now, it's not that hard. Both of my cars are manual, but only one has Bluetooth. Hold the phone in your left hand (presuming you're in a LHD country) and plan your shifts to avoid needing them mid-corner (which is something you should be doing anyways.
That said the Bluetooth is a lot nicer. I don't talk and drive often (unlike apparently most I pay more attention to the road than the other party, requiring a lot of repeated information and usually resulting in them deciding to call back later). I'd be all for requiring hands-free whenever driving, but I'm not sure how many cell phone related accidents actually involved the phone in the hand being a factor rather than the driver spacing out on their driving while they focus on the call.
As an administrator, giving network access to black hats by failing to block access SSH access to sensitive systems from unknown IP space just shows you are an idiot.
The part you're missing is that the concern here isn't unknown IP space for the most part. There are probably very few of these things actually exposed to the whole internet, and I agree that the people responsible for any that are need a good smacking. The concern is malicious users or code running within your network. Most networks fit the candy analogy, i.e. hard shell, soft insides. There may be decent external security but once you're inside the perimeter you often have open access to everything.
As someone else said, this is about the geeky mail clerk who is pissed about something and wants to make an impact when he leaves. An easily accessible backdoor like this could make such an attack nearly untraceable.
Sounds like you need a better security director, a better firewall/network infra admin, and some junior guy to read logs and watch the seim. The better question here is how/why was this device able to tunnel in/out of your network without someone explicitly allowing it? What you allow unfiltered egress from your data center? If you do your vendors are the least of your problems.
Reading helps...
There were other reasons their software needed to connect to them so they just used the same port to allow their support techs to have basically more access than I, the senior administrator had.
It's not hard to tunnel pretty much anything over anything else, particularly when encryption is involved. If your whatsit speaks a proprietary binary protocol or even just uses encryption in a reasonable way and has a legitimate reason to connect to outside sites, you don't really have a good way to know what exactly it's doing with that connection.
This is why Slashdot needs editing, I forgot to link the GTV app visibility guidelines.
https://developers.google.com/tv/android/docs/gtv_market_filtering
I would imagine these will carry through mostly unchanged to any console.
Of course it doesn't use the Play Store. It's not meant as a general-purpose Android platform (and neither would any Google console). It has to have it's own specialized store. You can't very well have a console loading apps that expect a touch screen, accelerometer, etc. Even if Google let their console use the Play Store, they would have to wall it off into it's own area.
It's not like we really need to speculate, they already have had television-optimized Android devices accessing the Play store officially for over a year and a half in the form of Google TV. This works fine because the Play store allows developers to filter device availability based on hardware capabilities. Android apps are assumed to require a touchscreen unless explicitly declared otherwise, so by default an app will not show up on GTV or presumably any future console. If the application's manifest is adjusted to state that it does not require a touchscreen and it has no other hardware dependencies, it'll show up on anything that can access the store.
No, you still misunderstood. OP was asking for an open + free solution for self hosting, not saying that all their code they wanted to host is open + free.
This was the important part:
At my company we use Git with some private repositories.
The private repositories are key. Those are not open. They may contain code which will eventually be released under an open and/or free license, but they are not currently. OP wants to take those out of "the cloud", using open/free solutions.
Which is done with the reboot option from within the OS, generally. The point was that most computers default to automatically sleeping in a reasonably short time and this has actually worked reliably for the last 5-10 years, so its fairly common to not actually turn a computer entirely off.
My desktop sleeps at five watts. Parasitic draw when entirely off is 1.5 or so. That's just short of 31 kWh in a year. At my electric rates, that means leaving it asleep rather than off for an entire year would add all of $6 to my electric bill. As it's certainly not off/asleep for all that time, the real-world impact is closer to $2-3. Even with a nice SSD, boot is a 30-45 second thing where the longest part of waking from sleep is waiting for my monitors to realize what's happened and turn on.
The cost of a smoothie every year in exchange for convenience every time I return to my computer? Yeah, worth it.
Also, most Mac users don't dual-boot unless they're gaming. VirtualBox works just as well for 95% of uses and adds a lot of features you don't get with bare metal installs like snapshots, plus Parallels and Fusion exist for those with more specific needs who can't get away with VirtualBox. I'll agree that many serious users of Intel Macs run Windows in some form, but the dual boot versus virtualized split has been shifting more and more towards virtualized over the years.
It's worth noting that mobile devices often decode popular compressed audio and video formats in dedicated hardware. Modern, powerful devices can play audio and sometimes video reliably in software, but they use a lot more battery power to do so in comparison, so sticking with formats natively supported by your hardware is still usually the best idea.
I think a few chips got Vorbis support and it wouldn't surprise me to find that FLAC made it in to real hardware somewhere, but there's a reason MP3 was basically the only real portable format choice for years.
Because in a lot of cases they own the facilities that print the books. The parts of the business that e-books either render obsolete or reduce the need for are parts where the big companies involved still make money. They see e-books as a threat to that part of their business and thus their profit margins. They've also seen what happened with music, if you are a content producer it's getting easier and easier to bypass most of the middlemen. The "big content" companies are the middlemen, so while I don't think anyone believes they'll win they'd still prefer to drag out the battle as long as possible. Doing anything in their power to reduce the appeal of e-books is part of that strategy.
And it still had major issues until Windows 2012. A few major services could not be used on Core machines, plus there was no way to "upgrade" a Core install to a full GUI or the other way around. Plus Powershell support was not the greatest back when that became available, so managing some of the services that worked fine could still be a chore.
It's nice that Microsoft still tries to build a decent server OS, but they're strung up by the fact that it's still Windows and thus they have to deal with the immense pile of legacy garbage that exists for Windows systems. Microsoft's own services may now all be good in a headless, GUI-less environment, but the third parties are a mess.
The reason *nix systems remain mostly clear of that shit is simply that they never compromised good design for user convenience at the same scale, so pretty much everything written for the platform is built to assume user-level privileges and GUIs being optional. I still to this day have software vendors telling me that their client application that just works with data from a remote system absolutely requires that all users be given Administrator privileges, and then acting like I'm the weird one when I refuse to do so. It's not like NT on the desktop is a new thing, am I unreasonable for expecting actively developed software to have been updated to 2000-era standards by now?
My roommate does the same in his Optima actually, I just picked SD because it seems to be the common choice among OEMs for nav storage these days and in my experience is more durable than USB drives.
I've killed a few USB drives in the course of normal use where while I've heard of them I've never seem an actual dead SD card. I'd expect the actual internal memory to be similar, so I can only imagine the difference comes from the physical form and possibly simpler interface.
And the hundreds of thousands of Chrysler MyGig systems with ordinary 2.5" laptop hard disks contained within are failing in massive quantities, right? Or any number of other manufacturers offering hard disk based storage in their entertainment system. Or the thousands of custom-built in car PCs rigged up by enthusiasts, until recently often equipped with full desktop disks for capacity reasons.
FYI, the "freezer trick" is a common way to coax some last remaining life out of a hard drive that won't spin up. They seem to like the cold, since one that doesn't work at room temperature in my experience has about a 20% chance of coming back to life if frozen. More than once I've rescued data with a USB cord running out from my minifridge.
Or we'll skip the hard drive altogether, SSDs are well under $1/GB for non-performance applications (which media storage in a vehicle certainly fits within). Since when did they care about vibration or the sort of temperatures cars are tested for? Hell, for the role a SD slot would be more than sufficient. Then not only is it practically indestructible media but it's entirely user swappable, allowing easier loading of content and trivial upgrades down the line.
Anyone who's used MyFord Touch or Cadillac Cue for more than a few minutes knows that the idea of these systems being heavily tested is laughable anyways. Supposedly old Sync was nicer and I haven't had any problems with Kia's Sync-derived UVO system, but I haven't used any of the others to really compare.
I can't agree. More times than I can count I've had a question about a local business which I've tried to find an answer to on their web site, something like what their hours are or often restaurant menus, but searching their name only results in a listing on one of the many useless yellow pages type sites. Many of my customers are small one or two person businesses, they'll tell me their email address and it's some random @aol or @hotmail which was clearly their personal account long before the business. It's entirely unprofessional these days to have absolutely zero internet presence and puts them in a position of having an uphill battle for me to respect them as a business.
It's not rocket science to have a domain with email and a basic web site. It's trivial to get a domain and the absolute minimum level of hosting required for such things, why people consider it acceptable to not do this I can't understand.
I had one of those too, the Timex DataLink series. It depended on the CRT flickering to perform a one-way sync of basic PIM data. This of course didn't work on LCDs or systems like NT where the level of control over the display Timex needed was unavailable, so they also had a serial-based gizmo that flashed a LED to do the same job.
I got mine in 1998 or so and used it as a watch until the plastic body of the watch fell apart some time in 2004. The PIM function hadn't been usable to me for a few years as I'd switched to NT in XP form when it came out, but I'd had a Palm m100 since 2001 so that wasn't really a big deal.
I'd like a modern take on the smart watch, even after getting the Palm I liked having a basic info set available wherever I went. A good "home screen" could put a lot of useful information at a glance without needing to pull your device out of your pocket. Calendar, incoming messages, caller ID, etc. I could see being very useful. Give it an e-paper display for massive battery life and I'm interested.