In a nutshell, the reason that conventional farming and ranching still produces the vast majority of the food we eat is because it's the least expensive means to produce that food. Hell, in a lot of parts of the country we don't even artificially irrigate the fields, we simply sculpt the dirt and embed seeds in it during a certain time of the year and let the rains and time do a large part of the work. Fields do require maintenance and monitoring, and equipment that does the work needs maintenance as well, but assuming that the weather cooperates we simply let nature carry the course we set it upon.
Hydroponics, indoor farming, UV and other spectrum-manipulation lighting, etc are all employed because there's something making traditional farming problematic. Lack of space. Desire for a plant/crop that doesn't grow or doesn't do well in the local climate. Hell, the illegal marijuana grow operations probably are doing the most to help advance this kind of farming simply because they can't be out in the open lest they get busted.
Transitioning to this kind of indoor farming doesn't make any sense unless there's a real reason for it, and waiting a couple of extra days for lettuce to leave the fields around Yuma Arizona so far hasn't proved to be enough reason for most people.
The point isn't that all farms are subsistence farms, but that the to qualify it needs the acreage to be able to provide for subsistence farming. Obviously the old, "40 acres and a mule," addage doesn't specifically apply anymore if one has mechanized tools to assist in the process of farming, but there's a lower limit that is more than a suburban residence is going to provide.
Given the way that I use electronics (and I suspect a lot of the IT professionals on Slashdot for whom "Pro" equipment would normally be marketed) the "one stupid tool" probably has a review more along the lines of what I need anyway.
The new Apple Macbook and Macbook Pro differences annoy me. I want the ports of the Macbook Pro, but I want a physical escape key like the Macbook. I've had enough late nights in server-rooms where I want both the ability to charge and the ability to use peripherals like console cables and ethernet cables where having a single port and an even more complex series of adapters is much more cumbersome, so the regular Macbook is flat-out out of the question, but the lack of real escape key that is as intuitive as the rest of the keyboard is also out of the question.
So this idea that a tablet could be a "Pro" machine is laughable when they can't even manage to keep their proper laptops "pro". When we talk about Apple starting to deviate from its generally reliable course as far as design goes, this is generally the kinds of things we're talking about. Perhaps we wouldn't have gotten multiple USB-C ports at all if Jobs hadn't died, but we probably also wouldn't have gotten the weird strip under the monitor in-lieu of the escape and function keys either.
I suppose I could try to get work to buy me an XPS-13 Developer Edition but they'd probably want to put Windows 10 on it in order to join it to the domain.
I'm fairly sure that the ring-topology network that we're part of is using some kind of GPON-type system, there's a sort of comb-filter for optical that splits out 1310 for the XFPs that they're using to connect to their equipment. Their rings are managed by their equipment before they hand-off to us, apparently we're not the only customer so the network is some kind of L2 MPLS tech on Alcatel equipment.
My guess is that since we're one of the launch-customers, they simply don't have enough fiber to avoid using a ring topology. Unfortunately that means their 2U LIU, their 2U filter, their 2U switch, and around 10U of AC-DC converter (their switches are DC-only) and batteries.
The previous service provider's equipment was much smaller, they handed-off with an L2 MPLS network too, but with a star topology they just had a 2U LIU, a 1U 3750 ME switch, and for places where we had sub-rate service below 1G, a 1U copper demarcation point. 4U instead of 16U.
I wish that the term farm would stop being applied to what amount to gardens. A garden has to get pretty damn big and have a pretty big yield before the scale of farm as a term really applies.
I guess part of my distaste for the abuse of the term stems from smug, self-important people referring to their urban gardening experiments as farms. Great, you've got some plants growing and producing fruit and vegetables. Is the yield even enough to feed your household for a season? If it's not even adequate for subsistence then it may be difficult to call a farm.
I've made a career in telecommunications as part of a large organization, going through migrations from T-carrier to metro-optical spoke-layout from one vendor, to metro-optical ring-layout from another vendor. This is in addition to PSTN, ISDN, and even the occasional presence of DSL and cablemodem.
One of the fundamental problems is the sheer amount of space required in telecom rooms for all of the various service providers to have their equipment, and decisions that the service providers themselves make can have fairly important impact on the space required.
Right now each large facility has basically four racks dedicated to service providers, moderate-sized facilities will have two racks, and small facilities will have one rack. Remember, this is for a single customer per facility, not multi-tenant facilities, and involves service-providers set up for specific purposes. We have one smallish building that was purchased with existing tenants, and thus has a couple of shared-use telecom rooms. We have probably five racks for four tenants plus ourselves in order to allow all ISPs to play. To give the service provider enough space for both their network equipment and their power-backup equipment.
The problem is that it's asking a lot for landlords to create telecom rooms that have the square footage, cleanliness, organization, and physical access control in order to allow multiple service providers to have presence. We have a few cell-towers located on our grounds and I've had the opportunities to see inside of Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile cell-tower installations, and assuming that service providers would want the level of integrity and security that the cell companies look for in their networks, it's going to be expensive to make this new network.
The only practical way I can see it working would be to build incredibly high-bandwidth fiber networks in a star topology where the power-reundancy is needed only for the building, rather than to keep a ring intact for adjacent customers, and to then break-out with some fairly expensive equipment in order to offer service to the tenants, as that equipment would need to be small in unit-usage so that the power, active network gear, and the demarcation point and LIU are able to fit into as little space as possible to allow more service providers to serve the building.
Otherwise I'm not sure how it would really work. Dedicated fiber to customers back to a CO or NX would take too much space in-conduit, but other solutions would take up too much floorspace in the building.
You might want to try to go over to those real-friends' homes to hang out. When you're married and especially if you have children you might not have a lot of time to spend out-and-about. You may be limited to having a beer or two with friends over an hour or two while you shoot the shit out in the garage before you have to go back in and be responsible again.
The competition-aspect is very true, and the problems when relationship turn sour, romantic or even simply platonic, is true also.
My only workplace romance was with a woman that did not work out of the same facility as I do; I was doing a lot of field work at the time so I got to visit everywhere. That made it a lot less problematic when the relationship ended because I never visited any single site frequently to begin with, and even if I did go to her site, odds were even that I wouldn't run into her anyway, the facility was big enough.
There are a fairly large number of former-friends in this place too, where they were friends when everyone was low-ranking, but the slim possibility for promotion plus the nature of the way patronage works meant that often those who were left-behind became bitter towards those that saw fairly rapid advancement, and those that advanced became shitheads to those who were now perceived as being lesser. Makes for an oh-so-fun work environment when one has to keep a flowchart of who does and doesn't like whom, to avoid topics to make it less unpleasant.
It's a similar problem with general-purpose computers in education settings like schools. That general-purpose computer is capable of doing thouands of things, only one of which is the assignment at-hand. This is compounded by the experience of using the computer being similar-to or the same-as using one's personal computer for entertainment.
I have a feeling that down the road, those with self-discipline to stay on-task despite the extremely easy opportunity for distraction will generally rise farther and faster than those that are easily distracted or otherwise can't stay on-task.
I found a social group irrespective of school when I was in my mid-teens. Once I graduated high school I didn't really see anyone from school anymore beyond the odd random encounter in a public place. Kind of the same for college friends; since I didn't live on-campus most of those acquaintances were made through class where we were thrown-together without much in the way of input, so those friendships didn't really last too long either.
Friends that I've made based on common interests have generally lasted a lot longer. A couple of friends were initially met at work, but being coworkers isn't what made us friends.
This is why I don't really want to hang-out with coworkers after the workday is over. I spend eight hours a day with you, and despite this industry attracting a lot of geeks we don't really have a whole lot in-common. Why would I want to spend even more time with you when I could spend it with people that share common interests?
I do the occasional happy-hour, but there's a surprising number of rabid sports fans in the office despite most of them never having played a sport since young childhood, and I don't like hanging-out with people that refer to their favorite out-of-state sports team as, "we," when discussing their trumphs and tribulations.
Yep. As I expressed, some real shots will be missed. This is entirely expected.
The advantage in managing to eliminate a lot of the all-but-point-blank shots though, is that it makes it harder for the shooter to avoid contaminating themselves with evidence. A firearm is a distance weapon, and when used at-range can make it very difficult to determine the particulars of the crime. The shooter's position may never be known, and the shooter might not get anything on themselves that they can't manage to clean-off. If a shooter has to literally press the barrel of the pistol into the victim's body to muffle the sound, then the shooter might end up covered in the victim's flesh and blood in a way that's detectable in an investigation.
Having watched a couple of Linus Tech Tips videos in the past and not been terribly impressed I was not expecting much in the way of good procedures. Since I can't watch the video right now, better to ask the questions and get a discussion on the nature of software testing going.
If he/they have managed to improve the quality of the youtube channel, good for them.
Nice try, given that I'm typing this on a Debian box in FF.
I asked what I asked because if I'm going to rely on someone's test results I want to be sure that the tests performed were thoughtfully designed and minimize the potential for the results to be skewed due to unaccounted-for issues in the testing procedures. Having done QA software testing myself, I know that it can be a challenge to develop realistic tests that actually present the bulk of use-cases for software to get valid results. Any fool can create a testing regimen that presents what they want to see, but it takes work to create tests that reflect reality closely enough to be useful and to make it hard for the unscrupulous to manipulate testing conditions.
If you want proof that a vendor would do that, look at all of the car company scandals involving cheating on emissions results. Prior to the 1996 model year, after cars got to six or seven years old they had to be tailpipe-tested in many places, so car companies were not free to cheat using computer manipulation because the cars, still within their undisclosed emissions warranties, were going to be retested while the manufacturer was on the hook for problems. 1996 an thereafter the automaker gets to tell the emissions test station that the car passes, rather than the station performing its own independent tests, so car companies that use trickery to pass at the government certification centers and emit whatever they want elsewhere can report that the car does indeed pass even if in actuality it doesn't.
So did the reviewer, upon completing the first round with the four machines, then rotate the software under-test across the machines, rerun, rotate again, rerun, etc?
What were the parameters of the test? Was this some kind of scripting that compelled the browser to pull content without user interaction? How was that achieved, and could extra usage from that software have skewed results? What content was pulled-down? Were different kinds of content, reflecting different kinds of users/usage pulled-down?
I ask all of this because it affects the results. A single browser on a single laptop is a sample size of one. If the testing involved four out-of-the-box laptops with new batteries an dfour browsers, then one has a single data point for each browser. More testing is probably necessary to establish real results instead of just generating fanboy arguments.
A powder-actuated nailer doesn't use a traditional barrel or fire a round that files through the air, so the sound made is different.
A system like this is going to have some false-positives, and is going to miss some actual gunshots. This is a given. The point of a system like this is to have a significantly more likely chance of detecting firearms discharge than just relying on people to report it. People in bad neighborhoods may have a snitches-get-stitches attitude, or may just be so jaded to gunshots that they don't bother calling anymore. Either way, this is a somewhat independent way getting information.
That could mean that he spends his time reviewing and signing-off on the work that his subordinates bring to him. He has personnel departments at his companies, they probably handle the structural part of employee decisions, so it's not like he has to be hiring/firing personally.
He would have to be technical in order to review drawings properly to make decisions based on what he receives. That is an aspect of technical product development. He could then make changes or advise that he wants changes made based on his own interpretation.
This actually explains the satellite radio model well- it starts-out "free" for a single year or whatever then gets shut down when the end subscriber doesn't care enough to bother paying for it.
Wife receives letters in the mail offering cheap renewal, she just throws them away. Doesn't feel a need to pay, not enough value over local OTA radio stations.
If we go on road-trips then that may be another matter, but until then we're fine.
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In a nutshell, the reason that conventional farming and ranching still produces the vast majority of the food we eat is because it's the least expensive means to produce that food. Hell, in a lot of parts of the country we don't even artificially irrigate the fields, we simply sculpt the dirt and embed seeds in it during a certain time of the year and let the rains and time do a large part of the work. Fields do require maintenance and monitoring, and equipment that does the work needs maintenance as well, but assuming that the weather cooperates we simply let nature carry the course we set it upon.
Hydroponics, indoor farming, UV and other spectrum-manipulation lighting, etc are all employed because there's something making traditional farming problematic. Lack of space. Desire for a plant/crop that doesn't grow or doesn't do well in the local climate. Hell, the illegal marijuana grow operations probably are doing the most to help advance this kind of farming simply because they can't be out in the open lest they get busted.
Transitioning to this kind of indoor farming doesn't make any sense unless there's a real reason for it, and waiting a couple of extra days for lettuce to leave the fields around Yuma Arizona so far hasn't proved to be enough reason for most people.
The point isn't that all farms are subsistence farms, but that the to qualify it needs the acreage to be able to provide for subsistence farming. Obviously the old, "40 acres and a mule," addage doesn't specifically apply anymore if one has mechanized tools to assist in the process of farming, but there's a lower limit that is more than a suburban residence is going to provide.
Given the way that I use electronics (and I suspect a lot of the IT professionals on Slashdot for whom "Pro" equipment would normally be marketed) the "one stupid tool" probably has a review more along the lines of what I need anyway.
The new Apple Macbook and Macbook Pro differences annoy me. I want the ports of the Macbook Pro, but I want a physical escape key like the Macbook. I've had enough late nights in server-rooms where I want both the ability to charge and the ability to use peripherals like console cables and ethernet cables where having a single port and an even more complex series of adapters is much more cumbersome, so the regular Macbook is flat-out out of the question, but the lack of real escape key that is as intuitive as the rest of the keyboard is also out of the question.
So this idea that a tablet could be a "Pro" machine is laughable when they can't even manage to keep their proper laptops "pro". When we talk about Apple starting to deviate from its generally reliable course as far as design goes, this is generally the kinds of things we're talking about. Perhaps we wouldn't have gotten multiple USB-C ports at all if Jobs hadn't died, but we probably also wouldn't have gotten the weird strip under the monitor in-lieu of the escape and function keys either.
I suppose I could try to get work to buy me an XPS-13 Developer Edition but they'd probably want to put Windows 10 on it in order to join it to the domain.
I'm fairly sure that the ring-topology network that we're part of is using some kind of GPON-type system, there's a sort of comb-filter for optical that splits out 1310 for the XFPs that they're using to connect to their equipment. Their rings are managed by their equipment before they hand-off to us, apparently we're not the only customer so the network is some kind of L2 MPLS tech on Alcatel equipment.
My guess is that since we're one of the launch-customers, they simply don't have enough fiber to avoid using a ring topology. Unfortunately that means their 2U LIU, their 2U filter, their 2U switch, and around 10U of AC-DC converter (their switches are DC-only) and batteries.
The previous service provider's equipment was much smaller, they handed-off with an L2 MPLS network too, but with a star topology they just had a 2U LIU, a 1U 3750 ME switch, and for places where we had sub-rate service below 1G, a 1U copper demarcation point. 4U instead of 16U.
I wish that the term farm would stop being applied to what amount to gardens. A garden has to get pretty damn big and have a pretty big yield before the scale of farm as a term really applies.
I guess part of my distaste for the abuse of the term stems from smug, self-important people referring to their urban gardening experiments as farms. Great, you've got some plants growing and producing fruit and vegetables. Is the yield even enough to feed your household for a season? If it's not even adequate for subsistence then it may be difficult to call a farm.
well if you're going to milk a bunch of bananas I don't think it's going to work too well.
I've made a career in telecommunications as part of a large organization, going through migrations from T-carrier to metro-optical spoke-layout from one vendor, to metro-optical ring-layout from another vendor. This is in addition to PSTN, ISDN, and even the occasional presence of DSL and cablemodem.
One of the fundamental problems is the sheer amount of space required in telecom rooms for all of the various service providers to have their equipment, and decisions that the service providers themselves make can have fairly important impact on the space required.
Right now each large facility has basically four racks dedicated to service providers, moderate-sized facilities will have two racks, and small facilities will have one rack. Remember, this is for a single customer per facility, not multi-tenant facilities, and involves service-providers set up for specific purposes. We have one smallish building that was purchased with existing tenants, and thus has a couple of shared-use telecom rooms. We have probably five racks for four tenants plus ourselves in order to allow all ISPs to play. To give the service provider enough space for both their network equipment and their power-backup equipment.
The problem is that it's asking a lot for landlords to create telecom rooms that have the square footage, cleanliness, organization, and physical access control in order to allow multiple service providers to have presence. We have a few cell-towers located on our grounds and I've had the opportunities to see inside of Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile cell-tower installations, and assuming that service providers would want the level of integrity and security that the cell companies look for in their networks, it's going to be expensive to make this new network.
The only practical way I can see it working would be to build incredibly high-bandwidth fiber networks in a star topology where the power-reundancy is needed only for the building, rather than to keep a ring intact for adjacent customers, and to then break-out with some fairly expensive equipment in order to offer service to the tenants, as that equipment would need to be small in unit-usage so that the power, active network gear, and the demarcation point and LIU are able to fit into as little space as possible to allow more service providers to serve the building.
Otherwise I'm not sure how it would really work. Dedicated fiber to customers back to a CO or NX would take too much space in-conduit, but other solutions would take up too much floorspace in the building.
You might want to try to go over to those real-friends' homes to hang out. When you're married and especially if you have children you might not have a lot of time to spend out-and-about. You may be limited to having a beer or two with friends over an hour or two while you shoot the shit out in the garage before you have to go back in and be responsible again.
The competition-aspect is very true, and the problems when relationship turn sour, romantic or even simply platonic, is true also.
My only workplace romance was with a woman that did not work out of the same facility as I do; I was doing a lot of field work at the time so I got to visit everywhere. That made it a lot less problematic when the relationship ended because I never visited any single site frequently to begin with, and even if I did go to her site, odds were even that I wouldn't run into her anyway, the facility was big enough.
There are a fairly large number of former-friends in this place too, where they were friends when everyone was low-ranking, but the slim possibility for promotion plus the nature of the way patronage works meant that often those who were left-behind became bitter towards those that saw fairly rapid advancement, and those that advanced became shitheads to those who were now perceived as being lesser. Makes for an oh-so-fun work environment when one has to keep a flowchart of who does and doesn't like whom, to avoid topics to make it less unpleasant.
It's a similar problem with general-purpose computers in education settings like schools. That general-purpose computer is capable of doing thouands of things, only one of which is the assignment at-hand. This is compounded by the experience of using the computer being similar-to or the same-as using one's personal computer for entertainment.
I have a feeling that down the road, those with self-discipline to stay on-task despite the extremely easy opportunity for distraction will generally rise farther and faster than those that are easily distracted or otherwise can't stay on-task.
Subby or the mod that approved it must've been using their smartphone.
I found a social group irrespective of school when I was in my mid-teens. Once I graduated high school I didn't really see anyone from school anymore beyond the odd random encounter in a public place. Kind of the same for college friends; since I didn't live on-campus most of those acquaintances were made through class where we were thrown-together without much in the way of input, so those friendships didn't really last too long either.
Friends that I've made based on common interests have generally lasted a lot longer. A couple of friends were initially met at work, but being coworkers isn't what made us friends.
This is why I don't really want to hang-out with coworkers after the workday is over. I spend eight hours a day with you, and despite this industry attracting a lot of geeks we don't really have a whole lot in-common. Why would I want to spend even more time with you when I could spend it with people that share common interests?
I do the occasional happy-hour, but there's a surprising number of rabid sports fans in the office despite most of them never having played a sport since young childhood, and I don't like hanging-out with people that refer to their favorite out-of-state sports team as, "we," when discussing their trumphs and tribulations.
Yep. As I expressed, some real shots will be missed. This is entirely expected.
The advantage in managing to eliminate a lot of the all-but-point-blank shots though, is that it makes it harder for the shooter to avoid contaminating themselves with evidence. A firearm is a distance weapon, and when used at-range can make it very difficult to determine the particulars of the crime. The shooter's position may never be known, and the shooter might not get anything on themselves that they can't manage to clean-off. If a shooter has to literally press the barrel of the pistol into the victim's body to muffle the sound, then the shooter might end up covered in the victim's flesh and blood in a way that's detectable in an investigation.
Having watched a couple of Linus Tech Tips videos in the past and not been terribly impressed I was not expecting much in the way of good procedures. Since I can't watch the video right now, better to ask the questions and get a discussion on the nature of software testing going.
If he/they have managed to improve the quality of the youtube channel, good for them.
Nice try, given that I'm typing this on a Debian box in FF.
I asked what I asked because if I'm going to rely on someone's test results I want to be sure that the tests performed were thoughtfully designed and minimize the potential for the results to be skewed due to unaccounted-for issues in the testing procedures. Having done QA software testing myself, I know that it can be a challenge to develop realistic tests that actually present the bulk of use-cases for software to get valid results. Any fool can create a testing regimen that presents what they want to see, but it takes work to create tests that reflect reality closely enough to be useful and to make it hard for the unscrupulous to manipulate testing conditions.
If you want proof that a vendor would do that, look at all of the car company scandals involving cheating on emissions results. Prior to the 1996 model year, after cars got to six or seven years old they had to be tailpipe-tested in many places, so car companies were not free to cheat using computer manipulation because the cars, still within their undisclosed emissions warranties, were going to be retested while the manufacturer was on the hook for problems. 1996 an thereafter the automaker gets to tell the emissions test station that the car passes, rather than the station performing its own independent tests, so car companies that use trickery to pass at the government certification centers and emit whatever they want elsewhere can report that the car does indeed pass even if in actuality it doesn't.
So did the reviewer, upon completing the first round with the four machines, then rotate the software under-test across the machines, rerun, rotate again, rerun, etc?
What were the parameters of the test? Was this some kind of scripting that compelled the browser to pull content without user interaction? How was that achieved, and could extra usage from that software have skewed results? What content was pulled-down? Were different kinds of content, reflecting different kinds of users/usage pulled-down?
I ask all of this because it affects the results. A single browser on a single laptop is a sample size of one. If the testing involved four out-of-the-box laptops with new batteries an dfour browsers, then one has a single data point for each browser. More testing is probably necessary to establish real results instead of just generating fanboy arguments.
After the mission the booster rocket will attempt to land on a droneship. The droneships name is "Just Read The Instructions."
You know, if you can't go with, "Read The Fucking Manual," the joke loses something.
Not all incidents involve a single shot being fired, or all shots being fired in extremely quick succession.
Not all victims die instantly as a result of being shot.
Not all incidents result in someone being shot, but where the shooter is still a danger.
A powder-actuated nailer doesn't use a traditional barrel or fire a round that files through the air, so the sound made is different.
A system like this is going to have some false-positives, and is going to miss some actual gunshots. This is a given. The point of a system like this is to have a significantly more likely chance of detecting firearms discharge than just relying on people to report it. People in bad neighborhoods may have a snitches-get-stitches attitude, or may just be so jaded to gunshots that they don't bother calling anymore. Either way, this is a somewhat independent way getting information.
But what does that mean exactly?
That could mean that he spends his time reviewing and signing-off on the work that his subordinates bring to him. He has personnel departments at his companies, they probably handle the structural part of employee decisions, so it's not like he has to be hiring/firing personally.
He would have to be technical in order to review drawings properly to make decisions based on what he receives. That is an aspect of technical product development. He could then make changes or advise that he wants changes made based on his own interpretation.
Given the successful space launches and cars I don't think there's any risk of him being remembered best for his PayPal involvement.
Was that the gorilla that got shot when the kid ended up in the enclosure?
And someday it might even be blase.
It'll catch on fire?! Cool!
This actually explains the satellite radio model well- it starts-out "free" for a single year or whatever then gets shut down when the end subscriber doesn't care enough to bother paying for it.
Wife receives letters in the mail offering cheap renewal, she just throws them away. Doesn't feel a need to pay, not enough value over local OTA radio stations.
If we go on road-trips then that may be another matter, but until then we're fine.