I didn't think to mention it in my previous post, but a dual-socket AMD Opteron 63xx system might be a reasonable alternative. Opterons appear to be significantly cheaper than Xeons (and in some cases, cheaper than I7s), to the point that you could get a 16-24 core AMD system for close to the same price as a high-end i7 (let alone a Xeon). I have no idea which would win on the benchmarks, though.
By the way, what sort of open-source GIS tools do you use? I occasionally find myself wanting to do GIS-related stuff, but I don't know where to start.
Aren't GIS problems embarrassingly-parallel enough that you should be worried about finding a faster GPU (or maybe switching to a multi-socket Xeon system) rather than about having the fastest single-threaded performance?
First of all, if your employer is acting illegally, then your real problem is that the rule of law has broken down in your shithole country. If that's truly the case, then you should move to another country without money or belongings and claim refugee status.
Of course, that's not really the case, now is it? Yeah, I didn't think so...
"Well, move!" you say?
Before you say I should work harder...
Before you say I should negotiate better...
I'm not going to say any of those things. What I am going to say is that you should cut costs. You say you spend $170/week, but only get paid $176/week? Then you can't afford to spend that much! If you're living by yourself, get a roommate. If you already have a roommate, get another one to take your bed and sleep on the couch. Or move out and borrow a friend's couch. Or sleep in your car. Or if you don't have a car, find a homeless shelter. And then eat nothing but ramen and/or whatever other food you can source for $1/day. After a few weeks of that, you've saved a couple hundred bucks. Congratulations, you now have savings, and now you can afford to move to get that $700/week job in the other city.
I really don't care how little you get paid! No matter how little it is you should always save some of your income, even if you're homeless and panhandling, because that's how you get yourself into a better situation. I'm not saying it's easy; I'm saying it's necessary. If you ever want to get ahead, you literally have no choice but to do it.
It's one thing if you have a nice pad of savings and can afford to say no to an offer. Not everyone is so lucky.
Luck has nothing to do with it. If you don't have savings, it's because you fucked up by spending too much of your income.
The only exception is if you're 15 years old and it's literally your first job, and in that case it's probably appropriate that the offer is for minimum wage.
Keynesian economics is the primary fraud that regards deficit spending as a good idea, and I'm certainly not going to cripple my mind by taking an economic course that promotes Keynes' hoax.
During the financial crisis, America instituted Keynesian policies (e.g. "quantitative easing") while Europe instituted austerity policies. Considering the results, it's hard to argue that the Keynesian policies didn't work better.
No, it's not the same story. The story now is about what Sourceforge did after that (i.e., locking the GIMP-for-Windows developer out of his account -- despite the fact that he had not "abandoned" it as Sourceforge claimed -- and distributing the crapware-bundled installer anyway).
Stories about that have been getting submitted over and over again since at least yesterday. Dice (which owns both Sourceforge and Slashdot) is suppressing them.
The parent post should not be off-topic. We don't have a choice except to talk about this on unrelated threads, precisely because Dice is suppressing stories about it!
don't have a magical fix. My latest pet theory is that, at a Federal level, there should be a specified number of politicians. Rather than state-by-state, gerrymandered-district-by-gerrymandered-district, shit should be direct. Is there 3% of the US population who are pot-smoking tree-humping eco-dweebs? Then 3% of the politicians should be from the Nature Molestin' Party. Sure, we wouldn't have the 'hope and change' of meaningless party swaps over individual seats. We might get locked into some terrible shit if the majority of the country are, in fact, clueless assholes. But it'd be better representation.
A much "simpler" change (in terms of concept, not ease of execution) would be to go re-learn the concept of Federalism and take a bunch of power away from the Federal government and give it to state and local ones. The less the Federal government has responsibility over, the less harm unaccountable Congresscritters can do.
Nah, I'm not nearly rad enough to drive an AMC Pacer. My car is just a nice, low-miles Miata.
Also, these days, Vanilla Ice is a general contractor / house-flipper. Not a bad gig, to be honest -- once I'm making enough money I'm maxing my tax-deferred investments, I indeed might try acting like him.
You poor, naive fool! A Charter merger with Time Warner would inevitably degrade Charter's customer service to Time Warner's level, not the other way around.
My 25-year-old Mazda* has a tape deck, and I'm perfectly happy with that. (Okay, I do have a minor quibble that there's no line-in port, but that's no big deal. At least it doesn't have a CD player instead; if that were the case then I'd actually have to get an aftermarket stereo.)
(*Don't knock it; it's very much on the "classic sports car" end of the spectrum, not the "old junky econobox" end.)
As to comedians being better at the news... no. Comedians are as good at science as they are at reporting the news.
They talk about what they think is funny and what will get the crowd on their side.
In medieval Europe, it was only the court jester who could, without [much] fear, speak uncomfortable truths to the king.
You've sadly fallen into the trap of thinking the daily show is an actual news program.
You misunderstand me: I'm well aware that it's not. The problem is that the "real" news programs are much, much worse!
2) IRL it's very complex to value sprawling cul de sacs of suburban development. When first built they're great because the people who live there are the kind of people who almost never need the government, and have a fairly good income. If they weren't both they wouldn't be able to afford to buy into a suburb. This means a miniscule tax rate is enough to run the city. Then life happens, and 50 years later you've got houses designed to standards nobody wants, owned by people who were too poor to move out, which means that a) they need lots of government services, and b) they can't pay for those services with the miniscule tax rate, leading to c) the City Manager scrambling around to save the city while the long-time residents are convinced that it's still an upper-income enclave. Quite a few very smart people have pointed out that it's much easier to build new suburbs then build a new Brooklyn because of the way the Feds give out grants.
You missed out on (arguably) the most important factor, which is that suburban sprawl is a gigantic pyramid scheme.
When a developer builds a new subdivision, he not only pays to construct the infrastructure for it, but also spends a bunch of money on building permits and (theoretically) impact fees, which go into the city's coffers. (I say "theoretically" because some particularly short-sighted, pro-development cities might undercharge on the impact fees.)
Those fees are supposed to go towards maintaining and upgrading the rest of the city's infrastructure to pay for the development's impact, but they don't. Instead they get used to balance the budget this year. In a couple of decades when that subdivision's infrastructure needs to be repaired or replaced, where does the money come from? If the city is lucky, it comes from the impact fees of whatever new neighborhood is being built then. If not, then the city is screwed.
The growth of the suburbs really exploded around WWII, so we're just now really starting to see the consequences of Ponzi development. If you think older, inner-ring suburbs are in a bad state now (except for the ones that managed to gentrify, and have all those mid-century ranches torn out and replaced with McMansions), just wait. It'll get worse before it gets better.
Oh yeah, they are highly regulated, which leads a rational mind to believe that is why they are significantly rare in crime.
Bullshit. They're not rare in crime because they're highly regulated; they're rare in crime because they're the wrong tool for the job. After all, WTF does a criminal care if he breaks the law by carrying a "regulated" gun? He's planning to commit a bunch of other crimes anyway!
Moreover, when automatic weapons are the right tool for the job, then criminals will have them. The Mexican drug cartels, for example, recently shot down a helicopter with a goddamn RPG! I have no doubt that owning an RPG is illegal in Mexico, but do you think they gave a flying fuck?
It is for ease of use, people don't want to set up a base station or server, it's just another thing then need to have.
Exactly: "it's just another thing [they] need to have." It's an entire extra product that these companies could be selling them (and profiting from!), but aren't. The question you should be asking yourself is "why are they foregoing that profit?"
The answer, of course, is "they aren't." The violation of privacy is more valuable!
Then there's the other side of it, if you're using a thermostat connected to Google then the data about when you use and don't use energy could be used to recommend an energy company that gives you the best rate for those times. How is that a bad thing?
First of all, my electric company is a monopoly, so that alleged benefit is irrelevant.
Second, have you ever heard of the term "confusopoly"? I don't really want to have to choose between 10 different electric companies with 10-different time-of-day-varying rate plans (none of which will actually match my usage pattern, of course). I already have to choose between natural gas providers, and it's a pain in the ass!
Third, I don't want Google to know about my hypothetical grow-op, Bitcoin mine, particle accelerator, or whatever the fuck I'm using the electricity for, not only because it's none of their damn business as a general principle, but also because I don't want them to report me to the DEA, SEC, or Department of Energy (respectively) and I don't want them showing embarrassing ads (for drug paraphernalia or plutonium) in my browser search results at work!
Fourth, but not least, I don't want Google to know about my lack of electricity use, either. The last thing I need is some Googler using his "20% time" to develop "Google Burglary," a tool for criminals to find out when I'm not using electricity and thus probably on out of town.
There is too much news to cover the slow way exclusively.
No. There's too much irrelevant celebrity bullshit and unimportant fluff to do that, but that kind of "news" is designed to distract, not inform. Only cover the important issues and there's plenty of time.
As to this all being corporate media's fault... can you give me a counter non-corporate media example that is better?
Any comedian (and yes, I realize what that implies about what a fucking sad a state of affairs we're really in). In particular, John Stewart, Steven Colbert and John Oliver are infinitely more informative than any allegedly-"actual" "news." And I mean "infinitely" literally, by the way -- measuring the valuable insight of, say, Fox News is like dividing by zero.
For example, John Oliver devoted an entire half-hour to government surveillance, including an interview with Edward Snowden where he (humorously) distilled these privacy issues into terms the general public would understand. I'm fucking appalled to have to say this, but that is many orders of magnitude better journalism than I've seen from any of those pathetically worthless toadies who actually call themselves "journalists" in decades.
And that's not even all! If you look at Youtube's autoplay list for John Oliver's videos, it appears that just about every goddamn episode covers an actually-important issue (civil forfeiture, the wealth gap, crumbling infrastructure, police brutality, net neutrality, etc.) and does it better than anyone in the mainstream media has managed since Walter fucking Cronkite!
Go fuck yourself. You've proven over and over again to be a worthless authoritarian bootlicker, and I see no reason to pay attention to anything you say.
For the benefit of everyone who isn't piece-of-shit Cold Fjord, I'll point out that (a) there's a difference between exercising civil rights and rioting, but the law enforcement agencies in the St. Louis area apparently can't tell what it is, and (b) the pattern of rounding people up for no reason (as well as "mob violence," if by "mob" you mean the police) started long before Michael Brown was shot.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a feeling that the typical ATX power cable is a much lower gauge than each wire in a USB cable. Or are USB 3.1 cables going to be thicker?
VNC/remote desktop running at 4k resolution and 60 Hz refresh rate?
I didn't think to mention it in my previous post, but a dual-socket AMD Opteron 63xx system might be a reasonable alternative. Opterons appear to be significantly cheaper than Xeons (and in some cases, cheaper than I7s), to the point that you could get a 16-24 core AMD system for close to the same price as a high-end i7 (let alone a Xeon). I have no idea which would win on the benchmarks, though.
By the way, what sort of open-source GIS tools do you use? I occasionally find myself wanting to do GIS-related stuff, but I don't know where to start.
Aren't GIS problems embarrassingly-parallel enough that you should be worried about finding a faster GPU (or maybe switching to a multi-socket Xeon system) rather than about having the fastest single-threaded performance?
First of all, if your employer is acting illegally, then your real problem is that the rule of law has broken down in your shithole country. If that's truly the case, then you should move to another country without money or belongings and claim refugee status.
Of course, that's not really the case, now is it? Yeah, I didn't think so...
I'm not going to say any of those things. What I am going to say is that you should cut costs. You say you spend $170/week, but only get paid $176/week? Then you can't afford to spend that much! If you're living by yourself, get a roommate. If you already have a roommate, get another one to take your bed and sleep on the couch. Or move out and borrow a friend's couch. Or sleep in your car. Or if you don't have a car, find a homeless shelter. And then eat nothing but ramen and/or whatever other food you can source for $1/day. After a few weeks of that, you've saved a couple hundred bucks. Congratulations, you now have savings, and now you can afford to move to get that $700/week job in the other city.
I really don't care how little you get paid! No matter how little it is you should always save some of your income, even if you're homeless and panhandling, because that's how you get yourself into a better situation. I'm not saying it's easy; I'm saying it's necessary. If you ever want to get ahead, you literally have no choice but to do it.
Luck has nothing to do with it. If you don't have savings, it's because you fucked up by spending too much of your income.
The only exception is if you're 15 years old and it's literally your first job, and in that case it's probably appropriate that the offer is for minimum wage.
O RLY? How, pray tell, does an Amazon Fire or whatever run my TV tuner cards (which is the primary purpose of an HTPC)?
During the financial crisis, America instituted Keynesian policies (e.g. "quantitative easing") while Europe instituted austerity policies. Considering the results, it's hard to argue that the Keynesian policies didn't work better.
So why can't Android just use fucking Samba?!
No, it's not the same story. The story now is about what Sourceforge did after that (i.e., locking the GIMP-for-Windows developer out of his account -- despite the fact that he had not "abandoned" it as Sourceforge claimed -- and distributing the crapware-bundled installer anyway).
Stories about that have been getting submitted over and over again since at least yesterday. Dice (which owns both Sourceforge and Slashdot) is suppressing them.
The parent post should not be off-topic. We don't have a choice except to talk about this on unrelated threads, precisely because Dice is suppressing stories about it!
While it may give grammar nazis fits, a slightly non-standard use of commas could eliminate the ambiguity in the original headline:
A much "simpler" change (in terms of concept, not ease of execution) would be to go re-learn the concept of Federalism and take a bunch of power away from the Federal government and give it to state and local ones. The less the Federal government has responsibility over, the less harm unaccountable Congresscritters can do.
Hey, at least I, for one, had learned my lesson by 2012.
Nah, I'm not nearly rad enough to drive an AMC Pacer. My car is just a nice, low-miles Miata.
Also, these days, Vanilla Ice is a general contractor / house-flipper. Not a bad gig, to be honest -- once I'm making enough money I'm maxing my tax-deferred investments, I indeed might try acting like him.
You poor, naive fool! A Charter merger with Time Warner would inevitably degrade Charter's customer service to Time Warner's level, not the other way around.
My 25-year-old Mazda* has a tape deck, and I'm perfectly happy with that. (Okay, I do have a minor quibble that there's no line-in port, but that's no big deal. At least it doesn't have a CD player instead; if that were the case then I'd actually have to get an aftermarket stereo.)
(*Don't knock it; it's very much on the "classic sports car" end of the spectrum, not the "old junky econobox" end.)
Let's be honest here: there's no reason why it can't be a little from column A and a little from column B.
In medieval Europe, it was only the court jester who could, without [much] fear, speak uncomfortable truths to the king.
You misunderstand me: I'm well aware that it's not. The problem is that the "real" news programs are much, much worse!
You missed out on (arguably) the most important factor, which is that suburban sprawl is a gigantic pyramid scheme.
When a developer builds a new subdivision, he not only pays to construct the infrastructure for it, but also spends a bunch of money on building permits and (theoretically) impact fees, which go into the city's coffers. (I say "theoretically" because some particularly short-sighted, pro-development cities might undercharge on the impact fees.)
Those fees are supposed to go towards maintaining and upgrading the rest of the city's infrastructure to pay for the development's impact, but they don't. Instead they get used to balance the budget this year. In a couple of decades when that subdivision's infrastructure needs to be repaired or replaced, where does the money come from? If the city is lucky, it comes from the impact fees of whatever new neighborhood is being built then. If not, then the city is screwed.
The growth of the suburbs really exploded around WWII, so we're just now really starting to see the consequences of Ponzi development. If you think older, inner-ring suburbs are in a bad state now (except for the ones that managed to gentrify, and have all those mid-century ranches torn out and replaced with McMansions), just wait. It'll get worse before it gets better.
Bullshit. They're not rare in crime because they're highly regulated; they're rare in crime because they're the wrong tool for the job. After all, WTF does a criminal care if he breaks the law by carrying a "regulated" gun? He's planning to commit a bunch of other crimes anyway!
Moreover, when automatic weapons are the right tool for the job, then criminals will have them. The Mexican drug cartels, for example, recently shot down a helicopter with a goddamn RPG! I have no doubt that owning an RPG is illegal in Mexico, but do you think they gave a flying fuck?
Exactly: "it's just another thing [they] need to have." It's an entire extra product that these companies could be selling them (and profiting from!), but aren't. The question you should be asking yourself is "why are they foregoing that profit?"
The answer, of course, is "they aren't." The violation of privacy is more valuable!
No. There's too much irrelevant celebrity bullshit and unimportant fluff to do that, but that kind of "news" is designed to distract, not inform. Only cover the important issues and there's plenty of time.
Any comedian (and yes, I realize what that implies about what a fucking sad a state of affairs we're really in). In particular, John Stewart, Steven Colbert and John Oliver are infinitely more informative than any allegedly-"actual" "news." And I mean "infinitely" literally, by the way -- measuring the valuable insight of, say, Fox News is like dividing by zero.
For example, John Oliver devoted an entire half-hour to government surveillance, including an interview with Edward Snowden where he (humorously) distilled these privacy issues into terms the general public would understand. I'm fucking appalled to have to say this, but that is many orders of magnitude better journalism than I've seen from any of those pathetically worthless toadies who actually call themselves "journalists" in decades.
And that's not even all! If you look at Youtube's autoplay list for John Oliver's videos, it appears that just about every goddamn episode covers an actually-important issue (civil forfeiture, the wealth gap, crumbling infrastructure, police brutality, net neutrality, etc.) and does it better than anyone in the mainstream media has managed since Walter fucking Cronkite!
Go fuck yourself. You've proven over and over again to be a worthless authoritarian bootlicker, and I see no reason to pay attention to anything you say.
For the benefit of everyone who isn't piece-of-shit Cold Fjord, I'll point out that (a) there's a difference between exercising civil rights and rioting, but the law enforcement agencies in the St. Louis area apparently can't tell what it is, and (b) the pattern of rounding people up for no reason (as well as "mob violence," if by "mob" you mean the police) started long before Michael Brown was shot.