(insert my standard question for all tech type people) Give me your best hack. Specifically something YOU did personally not hire / grad student. Hardware, software only (yes yes the GPL is cool but I'm looking for code or schematic or at least a description of something made out of source or solder)
I can't put words in your mouth but the ideal answer would be something like "I'm particularly proud of the O(n) memory garbage collection routine in emacs implemented around '89 and how it worked was very roughly..." or "I really like my homemade fully automatic automotive relay based routing system for my OH scale model railroad sorting yard" or "I built my own legal limit ham radio amplifier" almost certainly a different topic of course, but something of this form of answer.
Hey RMS I enjoyed listening to your "recent" interview on hacker public radio (its a podcast, or more accurately a syndication of podcasts, or something like that)
Anyway you talked a little about your wide ranging tastes in music and I've always wondered if you (or anyone else) has analyzed taste in specific genre of music vs taste is specific genre of programming. Like people who like psy-trance really like functional programming languages. Or wider range, like the most genre of music you like, the more genre of programming you like (which seems obvious?).
Only half way kidding around, if I'm trying to learn Scala, for example, what music should I listen to for inspiration?
One of Brooks's many excellent points is that quality happens only if somebody has the responsibility for it, and that "somebody" can be no more than one single person
Without an intermediary / roadblock, anyone who cares can fix the funny whoppers he found in the article. With an intermediary / roadblock the poor guy would be so horrifically overloaded no one would be permitted by the speedbump to fix the funny whoppers he found in the article.
TLDR of the article: "I found something that sucks, quick, lets insert an intermediary and more processes to slow us down!" After all, that's always worked wonders.
Not that I'm against strict technical standards to avoid the funny whoppers in the article. That was strategically never debated in the article. Look at the huge pile of debian packaging requirements. Almost all are excellent ideas. If the author is angry at FreeBSD ports he needs to convince FreeBSD to install a "you must be this tall to git commit" requirement, in other words stolen/borrowed stuff from Debian and elsewhere, not simply install a human speedbump, or argue that a human speedbump is the only possible solution in the face of better examples of doing stuff.
It wasn't offered to any employees when I worked there. If one is offered now, it wasn't historically so.
My mom worked in the arts and crafts dept at the local walmart part time from '89 or '90 when us kids were in high school until she retired in '11. As my dad said, she probably spent more than she earned. That's the price of having a job in your hobby, you spend 40 hours a week salivating about buying everything you see.
In contrast to the grandparent post, the walmart corporate site claims at least the entire produce aisle is also 10% off for employees. Donno about dry goods grocery items.
This has historically been a whine from non-employees about the "cool gift of the year" for literally decades. Before ebay existed the whine was classified ads. Buy twenty tickle me elmo dolls for 10% off because your coworker hides the shipping box in the back room, then sell it in the classifieds for twice list price = profit... My mom never did this but she heard a lot about it. I'm sure the whining now would be about ipad sales or nintendo wii-u or whatever is cool this year.
Before online shopping, your bar for acceptable prices was probably different.
Before online shopping, their bar for acceptable prices was also different.
Now they see a retail brick and mortar shopper as a dumb easy mark or a desperate dude in a hurry, both to be screwed over as much as possible. That's the only explanation I can come up with for some of their insane stocking selections and pricing decisions.
So, unless its a subject where I'm an idiot, or I'm in a huge hurry, I don't brick and mortar anymore, and everybody's on the same page and happy.
The only solution I know of is hybrid for cheap luxury/hobby stuff. I brew beer at home occasionally and the local brewing store will never be replaced because if you know what you're doing you buy fresh live yeast packs from a reputable dealer (and overnight fedex is way too expensive and still risky to kill the yeast) and you sniff the hops before you buy them to get exactly what you want, or at least exactly what you think you want (its a complicated craft, full of pitfalls...). He also has bulk dry goods on the shelf that should probably be bought from amazon, but if you're there buying hops and yeast and stuff and there's a $5 bag of bottle caps, even if I could buy that $5 bag on amazon for $4... eh... its a cheap luxury. I can not justify leaving 20% on the table for a $5000 purchase, but for an occasional $5 purchase, yeah OK I'll "throw away" a buck.
Spending locally can benefit you, or divert harm from you.
Fundamentally either you're paying the salary of a sales clerk or the salary of a UPS/truck/postal deliveryman. Both do fundamentally the same thing, take big packages from China and give you little packages and both make about the same take home pay. Both pay about the same taxes, blah blah.
The critical difference is half of both of them are below median in their profession. When the sales clerk is one of the 50% below median, it makes for a miserable awful experience and a waste of time and unhappiness. When the UPS driver is below median for a UPS driver, it means... not much... everyone has a horror story about that 0.01% of deliveries, kind of like the 0.01% of brick and mortar where you get involved in an armed robbery or falsely accused of shoplifting, but the bottom half of UPS deliveries is not so bad... like maybe the driver neglects to say "merry christmas". Overall you're far better off when the UPS driver is in the bottom 50% than when the retail clerk is in the bottom 50%.
That's exactly what I don't want when I go shopping. I Fing hate that.
"Would you like to buy a cellphone?" "An ethernet card? Whats that? Oh I see, one of those, yeah we don't sell many of those." "What are you going to do with it?" "Linux? Mythtv? Whats that? I don't think thats supported" "You're saying there is more than one brand/model of ethernet card? No sir I assure you this is the only kind ever made and you can't buy a better one anywhere else." "PCI-e... PCIx16... PCI.... Um I donno whatever it say on the box. (looks at shelf) Its $19.95 thats about all I know." "Do you need someone to install it for $99 here or $199 at your home?" "Would you like to buy a $99 five foot cat-5 ethernet monster cable to go with that?" "How about a replacement plan that'll only be 90% the price of the card for one year" "Your buyers card thing (it has a name I forget), oh you don't have one? Would you like to give all your demographic details, a DNA sample, and a kidney to apply? Its really worth it, you'll get $2 off this order, one percent off each Rick Astley CD you buy for the next year, and this nifty plastic card. You suuure you don't want one?" "I see you're paying with cash, its going to take quite awhile for me to figure out on my fingers how to make $1.26 in change, meanwhile would you like to apply for a best buy credit card?" "Can I see your receipt please before you leave the building? You look sketchy."
Yeah (insert sarcasm) I really miss that when I shop at amazon (end sarcasm)
About the only two questions I like about the experience are when the cute loss prevention girl at the front door asks how I'm doing today, and when the cute cashier girl asks if I found everything I was looking for today. The hooters business model of attracting customers, essentially. Another hilarious thing is I had to make this story up because my last trip to BB failed because they don't sell components like ethernet cards anymore. Used to, just a couple years ago.
Note that I like talking to people in general, I just hate the brick and mortar shopping experience. Mostly because I know from personal experience the poor bastards are asking scripted questions and are rated by the boss on how well they follow the script. Amazon throws up plenty of stupid scripty robotic stuff just like retailers, but they don't pretend to provide a human experience, so there's no uncanny valley, and its really easy to instantly skip past.
But it only takes a handful of explorers and malcontents to establish a colony, and available evidence is that evolution preferentially selects for organisms driven to reproduce
A good argument but I'd counter that for most of human evolution moving a couple miles in any direction to set up a new tribe mostly worked, but "most" random stellar "space seeds" are going to croak enroute.
And yet we never observed that kind of matter before?
People focus on the accelerator, but what really matters is the detector. And now that we have a nice detector, lets get a high beam current at a high enough energy to make something interesting to look at.
If you just want to look at high energy collisions, wait around for high energy cosmic rays. Individually some are much higher energy than any accelerator, but the equivalent of the "beam current" is ridiculous low, like two digit orders of magnitude lower.
DRM is not intended to stop piracy. It's intended to stop legal resales and gifting of products.
Its also a FUD product for sellers of DRM software and licensors of DRM tech (patents etc).
"If you don't pay us $250K for magicdrm(tm) then pirates will steal your stuff, so pay up, dweeb"
The correct response is:
"They'll steal it anyway, and we'll be out a quarter mil, and our legit customers will be angry" "grrr.... well on to the sales meeting with the next batch of suckers"
The wrong/popular response is:
"OK here's the money and I'll check this off on my performance review" "Thanks and heres some baseball season tickets"
3) Intelligence means they want to communicate with the savages. Think back to earths colonial era, how many average joes in England wanted to talk to or hang out with who they considered savages? Once you grow out of the cultural toddler era of religion, and grow out of the slavery and colonialism era, there is no intense demand to visit, meet, or talk to the savages, is there? So we'll have rich tourists and anthropologists visiting and watching us, both of who want to keep a low profile so they can study us and keep it real.
4) Why would the aliens communicate using our tech? Why EM radiation? If you can modulate gravity or have a really great sensitive high bandwidth neutrino detector, why use crappy old fashioned EM waves? Just because its the best we could invent in the 1800s doesn't mean it'll always be the best. Its quite possible we currently sitting on a trunk line for intergalactic cable TV using gravitons and/or neutrinos and don't even have the tech (yet) to tell. This is assuming a future telecom tech is something we have even heard about or can currently imagine. Some string theory thing which will be invented in 2163 might be the basis of the intergalactic "wifi" internet and we can't even imagine it yet.
5) Expansion and exploration is taken as granted by an expansion oriented industrial planet, for obvious reasons. I'm not sure it would be by a post singularity civilization. Once you've got your quantum computers and dyson sphere, do you need to conqueror a galaxy? The number of homebodies and hermits vastly exceeds the number of explorers and that's missing from the equation.
.... atmospheric 'fingerprint' (i.e. chemical spectra) is very different from natural elements
Are these CFCs made from exotic kinds of matter?
Yes. This is another "talk to a chemist". Ur doing it wrong, when halogens accumulate in your ozone layer. There seems to be no way to get them there, in extreme bulk, other than CFC release on the surface, or maybe some kind of insane doomsday weapon, both of which indicate extreme industrialization and a certain lack of ecological concern.
A standard/. automotive analogy is car sized lumps of unoxidized iron with certain precise and consistent fractions of dissolved carbon found on top of strips of heavy petroleum fractions mixed with gravel is just too weird geologically and biochemically to be anything but the product of intelligent life. You just don't find those elements laying around in that physical configuration.
What makes you think that life on another planet won't have found some biological use for CFCs?
Oh man, talk to a chemist, they are inert, which makes things biologically complicated and the precursors are beyond nasty. For a good time google for Bromotrifluoromethane Synthesis (aka what you non-chemists would call "Halon") and imagine what it takes to make it both industrially and almost unimaginably via biosynthesis. Its not so much the final step that's the problem, but the precursors, processing the raw materials, etc.
Its probably a pretty good "dependency" marker indicating advanced stainless steel fabrication, extensive acid production industries, hmm I'd have to think. Biological tissue has severe issues dealing with fluorine ions, which is too bad.
Its not for lack of evolutionary pressure. Plenty of vessels and orifices would benefit by a native layer of teflon. Imagine the predator prey relations in a world of teflon skin. Some of the room temp liquid CFCs would superficially make a good replacement for that fluid in the bone joints (sorry not doc don't know its technical name).
Theres also some evolutionary pressure in that you'd need a species that eats flourite ore rocks (or at least stuff grown in its soil, or naturally heavily floridated water) AND in the halon example a biological bromine source... One or the other, OK, but at this time of day I can't think of a way to pull off both. Some kind of migratory coastal ruminant mammal? Um...
Also there's some thermodynamics issues, if you could pull off the synthesis in a cell, it would need to be a better idea than simply synth more ATP or hemoglobin or whatever else... Need to find a bio app where CFCs are more beneficial than anything else a cell can synth. CFCs are expensive to make so you need a good reason. Much as superficially silicon based brains "seem" more sensible than neuron based brains but its so hard to make a self reproducing factory the size of a typical mammal womb that its not happening any time soon.
To some extent thats why halon is such a good fire extinguisher around humans. Terrestrial biochemistry has almost no idea how to interact with it, so it pretty much doesn't. CFC suffocation is a zillion times more likely than CFC poisoning. I was told but am too lazy to verify that if you get CFCs into your blood your kidneys get somewhat confused.
My guess is insurance fraud reasons. So you want a new phone, report the old one stolen, get the official theft report from the cops, but are dumb enough to keep using the old phone to call the same people until you visit the local dealer (phone dealer, just another branch of organized crime) to get a replacement under your theft insurance contract.
In the old days this happened when you'd get a $1000 bill for calling guatemala for 8 hours... Um uh that wasn't me, uh, um stolen yeah thats it... "so why, after the thief ran up the international bill, did the thief call your mom and talk to her for 15 minutes?" "...."
And why would they, if all you're doing is going in, looking at it, then buying off amazon.
Ah but I had a day off and would pay anything to walk out that door with an ethernet card. Local whitebox small dealer types are closed on Sunday. Its the "convenience store" model. If I wanted to pay $3 for a gallon of milk I'd go to the megamart 3 miles away and wait in line for 10 minutes, but I'll pay $4 to stop at the gas station convenience store 1/2 mile from home on the main road if I'm in a hurry
Ditto when I destroyed my bluetooth earpiece and I needed one for the next day, how will I listen to audiobooks and podcasts and music? Work in silence? Unthinkable!
Ditto when my cell phone charger broke during vacation 500 miles from home. I don't care if it costs 2x as much as amazon I need that %$&* charger right now! Not 2-day "prime" shipping or whatever. My battery doesn't last that long....
Several times I grin and bear it when I need a HDMI cable and order a $5 one from amazon because there is no way I can stomach paying $75 at best buy for the same cable. However if they were not so greedy, they could get maybe $15 from me if I was in a huge hurry, and 150% profit in the cash register beats a theoretical profit of 15000% on a sale that isn't going to happen.
They can stay in business a long time with that model, basically a really big "radio shack" with more items... This business of stocking 500 external hard drives and no ethernet cards isn't going to work.
Also, if I walk in, pick up the ethernet card of my dreams, and in a fit of happiness I might grab a DVD for my family. But now I know not to bother going there to buy "computer stuff" anymore, so they'll never get another chance to toss an extra thing in my basket. Now amazon gets a chance to tell me that people who buy a pci-e broadcom ethernet card often also buy a DVD of the movie "Brave" or WTF. Too bad so sad best buy, bye bye.
hmmn.. if intelligent aliens would have analyzed Earth's atmosphere 400yrs ago, as proposed, they would have dismissed it saying no life exists in our solar system.
In some ways that's easier because there is no requirement to only look once. They'd see all kinds of interesting atmospheric changes over a couple centuries, not just CFCs. Weathermen studying climate on distant planets will eventually be a growth industry.
You could have fun trying to list atmospheric changes over time. Hmm I'd say first you see lots of particulates from cruddy fire, like london smog in 1800. Then you'd see a lot of sulfur compounds. Then you'd see strange radioisotopes (probably too low concentration to detect remotely, but...). Then CFCs burst on the scene, accumulate for awhile, then stop accumulating. Meanwhile CO2, methane, and O2 ratios start getting weird, for awhile. Drought in developed ag land leads to dust bowls, so the more developed ag land you have, the worse air quality is during droughts. You could probably make environmental planning theory guesses about forest fire management over time based on how fast they burn out. Another good one would be blooming deserts, it takes industrialized civilization to do it quickly, however temporarily.
I've been hearing anti-scada fud for about two decades and it never gets any better.
I suppose as agitprop the early 1980s movie "wargames" is pretty good anti-scada. Or claims that Kevin Mitnick can whistle into a telephone thus launching nuclear missiles. There was a cheesy hollywood horror/action movie in the late 80s or 90s that could basically be subtitled "misterhouse grows into a skyscraper and has a tantrum killing everyone inside". I distinctly remember a 6-million dollar man or 6-million dollar woman (a late 1970s psuedo-scifi tv show) which had a nuclear power plant scada attack, with a friendly computer that donated a 7400 series TTL logic chip to repair the magic prosthesis that was LOL funny at the time. There is also at least one anti-scada james bond movie, probably 80s era but I can't remember the details. Oh and there was a cheesy 80s "hacking" TV kids show perhaps the "whiz kids" or something that also had a anti-scada plotline.
There's about 50 zillion star trek episodes and movies which basically show a scada attack on a warship. Most notably when Kirk drops Kahn's shields remotely and pretty much blows his ship up in ST2. But there's about 49 other examples.
This would be a fun/. article... everybody troll the depths of your memory to build a timeline of anti-scada FUD.
False dilemma. One excellent security practice not being the sole practice necessary doesn't mean its not an excellent security practice.
I've never worked at a place without airgapped or at least tightly firewalled "IT" and "production"/"engineering" networks. I'm sure there exist places where the receptionist can install a toolbar or weatherbug on her windows PC and literally blow up the plant, but I've never personally seen or worked at one.
An important point is its a general class of software. A great/. analogy would be journalists reporting exploits in "web browsing" when they really mean specific (ancient) versions of MSIE.
So if your SCADA software is listed above, I'd sweat. If not, eh.
A good working definition is its like a robot that doesn't move, externally anyway.
Yeah but that's the danger of hyperoptimization. If you paint yourself into a tiny corner, then you're stuck in a corner, and there's no guarantee that every mobo in the future will have more features. Good luck buying a modern mobo with 4 onboard RS-232 ports or... pretty much any ISA at all.
So I'm not seeing a soldered on CPU hurting hyperoptimization as a hobby. You'll still get to paint yourself into a corner to your hearts content, its just that the paintbrush now comes shrinkwrapped with each paint can.
Also your specs seem really low. I didn't even see a board that low when I did my upgrade. Maybe there is some specialist whitebox supplier who only makes 2-ram-slot mobos but... wow.
Dell charges incrementally more money for better CPUs and offers a half-dozen choices on most systems. They would probably handle this at board assembly versus soldering on the CPU.
Probably more likely fusible links in the CPU or the equivalent, you only pay for 4 cores the other 4 on the die get zapped. Or a windows only "driver" to authenticate what clock speed you paid for every 5 minutes or it drops to the minimum speed. This is all stuff thats been done before in different processing markets (embedded, mainframes, etc). Unfortunately whatever IBM did with the Z-series mainframes and unisys etc etc is probably falling off patent
How does it cut costs? Are the tiny pins really that expensive? What are they made out of? Platnium?
I can't speak for every CPU and socket ever made but I can speak generically that in the electronics biz gold plate is not unusual on sockets although rare on IC pins.
The real killer is capacitance. Just dump more current, yeah right.
Always. I have never owned a PC in which I have not upgraded the CPU at least once.
Post-PC AT era, about the same here for my main machines. Side / secondary machines are not upgraded, treated as appliance. I'm guessing we do about the same upgrade protocol... and the average/.er is getting VERY confused how this works.
Example. Go back about a decade. My old P-2 or P-75 or whatever was feeling slow and AMD's mainline socket at the time was the 939. Not new, but not obsolete either. That year I buy a decent 939 mobo and the cheapest slowest POS 939 CPU that is available. A couple years later, they release the 940 socket probably purely to segment the market or whatever. Anyway, 939 CPUs get CHEAP and I buy the fastest one ever made for like $100, which actually performs pretty well compared to a cheap 940. A couple years later the Worlds Fastest 939 CPU was getting a tad slow, so... I don't remember but it was the strategy above, a decent mobo with the cheapest compatible CPU, years later to be upgraded to the fastest CPU in that socket ever made...
Yes, I have run into exciting problems like the mobo BIOS needs to be upgraded to the newest version to even recognize the "worlds fastest X" cpu which didn't even exist as a cpu revision number when the mobo was made. Been there, had to reinstall the old cpu, upgrade the bios, and re-re-install the new cpu.
No, you can't really afford to do this with cutting edge CPUs and always buy the most expensive one available every 3 months or whatever, that would be quite an expensive hobby, or at least a waste of time WRT optimization of fun per $. But if you pay attention to the market, you can maintain a spot above average for practically no money.
1) Never upgrade unless its slow. The CPU I mean, not the graphics card or whatever else. 2) Never buy a mobo with anything but the cheapest possible CPU 3) When that socket expires, wait until the fastest CPU for that socket ever made is about $99 then upgrade 4) Repeat for about 20 years (so far). I've been doing something like this since the 386 era.
Yes, but what if the motherboard you want only comes sold with a CPU you don't want, or vice-versa? This bundling will in practice reduce choice, as I doubt every combination will be offered.
There are different motherboards? Well, I'm sure there are different models, but different enough to matter? I just upgraded my basement fileserver / mythtv backend mobo and cpu because I wanted hardware virt support for some experiments. All I paid attention to was the CPU details to make sure I got a CPU with hardware virt, which I did and it works quite well...the mobo is just a bridge between the power supply and cpu, and its got some peripherals hanging off it like ethernet and SATA...
Seriously is there anything worth shopping for in a mobo?
That file naming convention is too predictable. Around here we use names like: winter-project nov-15-project project-2.0 11.05.12-project project-somebodys-name
Which one is the most recent? Oh look at the last modified date for the file, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
(insert my standard question for all tech type people)
Give me your best hack. Specifically something YOU did personally not hire / grad student.
Hardware, software only (yes yes the GPL is cool but I'm looking for code or schematic or at least a description of something made out of source or solder)
I can't put words in your mouth but the ideal answer would be something like "I'm particularly proud of the O(n) memory garbage collection routine in emacs implemented around '89 and how it worked was very roughly ..." or "I really like my homemade fully automatic automotive relay based routing system for my OH scale model railroad sorting yard" or "I built my own legal limit ham radio amplifier" almost certainly a different topic of course, but something of this form of answer.
Hey RMS I enjoyed listening to your "recent" interview on hacker public radio (its a podcast, or more accurately a syndication of podcasts, or something like that)
Anyway you talked a little about your wide ranging tastes in music and I've always wondered if you (or anyone else) has analyzed taste in specific genre of music vs taste is specific genre of programming. Like people who like psy-trance really like functional programming languages. Or wider range, like the most genre of music you like, the more genre of programming you like (which seems obvious?).
Only half way kidding around, if I'm trying to learn Scala, for example, what music should I listen to for inspiration?
I laughed at the article examples.
One of Brooks's many excellent points is that quality happens only if somebody has the responsibility for it, and that "somebody" can be no more than one single person
Without an intermediary / roadblock, anyone who cares can fix the funny whoppers he found in the article. With an intermediary / roadblock the poor guy would be so horrifically overloaded no one would be permitted by the speedbump to fix the funny whoppers he found in the article.
TLDR of the article: "I found something that sucks, quick, lets insert an intermediary and more processes to slow us down!" After all, that's always worked wonders.
Not that I'm against strict technical standards to avoid the funny whoppers in the article. That was strategically never debated in the article. Look at the huge pile of debian packaging requirements. Almost all are excellent ideas. If the author is angry at FreeBSD ports he needs to convince FreeBSD to install a "you must be this tall to git commit" requirement, in other words stolen/borrowed stuff from Debian and elsewhere, not simply install a human speedbump, or argue that a human speedbump is the only possible solution in the face of better examples of doing stuff.
It wasn't offered to any employees when I worked there. If one is offered now, it wasn't historically so.
My mom worked in the arts and crafts dept at the local walmart part time from '89 or '90 when us kids were in high school until she retired in '11. As my dad said, she probably spent more than she earned. That's the price of having a job in your hobby, you spend 40 hours a week salivating about buying everything you see.
http://careers.walmart.com/company-benefits/
In contrast to the grandparent post, the walmart corporate site claims at least the entire produce aisle is also 10% off for employees. Donno about dry goods grocery items.
This has historically been a whine from non-employees about the "cool gift of the year" for literally decades. Before ebay existed the whine was classified ads. Buy twenty tickle me elmo dolls for 10% off because your coworker hides the shipping box in the back room, then sell it in the classifieds for twice list price = profit... My mom never did this but she heard a lot about it. I'm sure the whining now would be about ipad sales or nintendo wii-u or whatever is cool this year.
Before online shopping, your bar for acceptable prices was probably different.
Before online shopping, their bar for acceptable prices was also different.
Now they see a retail brick and mortar shopper as a dumb easy mark or a desperate dude in a hurry, both to be screwed over as much as possible. That's the only explanation I can come up with for some of their insane stocking selections and pricing decisions.
So, unless its a subject where I'm an idiot, or I'm in a huge hurry, I don't brick and mortar anymore, and everybody's on the same page and happy.
The only solution I know of is hybrid for cheap luxury/hobby stuff. I brew beer at home occasionally and the local brewing store will never be replaced because if you know what you're doing you buy fresh live yeast packs from a reputable dealer (and overnight fedex is way too expensive and still risky to kill the yeast) and you sniff the hops before you buy them to get exactly what you want, or at least exactly what you think you want (its a complicated craft, full of pitfalls...). He also has bulk dry goods on the shelf that should probably be bought from amazon, but if you're there buying hops and yeast and stuff and there's a $5 bag of bottle caps, even if I could buy that $5 bag on amazon for $4... eh... its a cheap luxury. I can not justify leaving 20% on the table for a $5000 purchase, but for an occasional $5 purchase, yeah OK I'll "throw away" a buck.
Spending locally can benefit you, or divert harm from you.
Fundamentally either you're paying the salary of a sales clerk or the salary of a UPS/truck/postal deliveryman. Both do fundamentally the same thing, take big packages from China and give you little packages and both make about the same take home pay. Both pay about the same taxes, blah blah.
The critical difference is half of both of them are below median in their profession. When the sales clerk is one of the 50% below median, it makes for a miserable awful experience and a waste of time and unhappiness. When the UPS driver is below median for a UPS driver, it means... not much... everyone has a horror story about that 0.01% of deliveries, kind of like the 0.01% of brick and mortar where you get involved in an armed robbery or falsely accused of shoplifting, but the bottom half of UPS deliveries is not so bad... like maybe the driver neglects to say "merry christmas". Overall you're far better off when the UPS driver is in the bottom 50% than when the retail clerk is in the bottom 50%.
Your interaction is a dialogue
That's exactly what I don't want when I go shopping. I Fing hate that.
"Would you like to buy a cellphone?"
"An ethernet card? Whats that? Oh I see, one of those, yeah we don't sell many of those."
"What are you going to do with it?"
"Linux? Mythtv? Whats that? I don't think thats supported"
"You're saying there is more than one brand/model of ethernet card? No sir I assure you this is the only kind ever made and you can't buy a better one anywhere else."
"PCI-e... PCIx16... PCI.... Um I donno whatever it say on the box. (looks at shelf) Its $19.95 thats about all I know."
"Do you need someone to install it for $99 here or $199 at your home?"
"Would you like to buy a $99 five foot cat-5 ethernet monster cable to go with that?"
"How about a replacement plan that'll only be 90% the price of the card for one year"
"Your buyers card thing (it has a name I forget), oh you don't have one? Would you like to give all your demographic details, a DNA sample, and a kidney to apply? Its really worth it, you'll get $2 off this order, one percent off each Rick Astley CD you buy for the next year, and this nifty plastic card. You suuure you don't want one?"
"I see you're paying with cash, its going to take quite awhile for me to figure out on my fingers how to make $1.26 in change, meanwhile would you like to apply for a best buy credit card?"
"Can I see your receipt please before you leave the building? You look sketchy."
Yeah (insert sarcasm) I really miss that when I shop at amazon (end sarcasm)
About the only two questions I like about the experience are when the cute loss prevention girl at the front door asks how I'm doing today, and when the cute cashier girl asks if I found everything I was looking for today. The hooters business model of attracting customers, essentially. Another hilarious thing is I had to make this story up because my last trip to BB failed because they don't sell components like ethernet cards anymore. Used to, just a couple years ago.
Note that I like talking to people in general, I just hate the brick and mortar shopping experience. Mostly because I know from personal experience the poor bastards are asking scripted questions and are rated by the boss on how well they follow the script. Amazon throws up plenty of stupid scripty robotic stuff just like retailers, but they don't pretend to provide a human experience, so there's no uncanny valley, and its really easy to instantly skip past.
But it only takes a handful of explorers and malcontents to establish a colony, and available evidence is that evolution preferentially selects for organisms driven to reproduce
A good argument but I'd counter that for most of human evolution moving a couple miles in any direction to set up a new tribe mostly worked, but "most" random stellar "space seeds" are going to croak enroute.
And yet we never observed that kind of matter before?
People focus on the accelerator, but what really matters is the detector. And now that we have a nice detector, lets get a high beam current at a high enough energy to make something interesting to look at.
If you just want to look at high energy collisions, wait around for high energy cosmic rays. Individually some are much higher energy than any accelerator, but the equivalent of the "beam current" is ridiculous low, like two digit orders of magnitude lower.
DRM is not intended to stop piracy. It's intended to stop legal resales and gifting of products.
Its also a FUD product for sellers of DRM software and licensors of DRM tech (patents etc).
"If you don't pay us $250K for magicdrm(tm) then pirates will steal your stuff, so pay up, dweeb"
The correct response is:
"They'll steal it anyway, and we'll be out a quarter mil, and our legit customers will be angry"
"grrr.... well on to the sales meeting with the next batch of suckers"
The wrong/popular response is:
"OK here's the money and I'll check this off on my performance review"
"Thanks and heres some baseball season tickets"
3) Intelligence means they want to communicate with the savages. Think back to earths colonial era, how many average joes in England wanted to talk to or hang out with who they considered savages? Once you grow out of the cultural toddler era of religion, and grow out of the slavery and colonialism era, there is no intense demand to visit, meet, or talk to the savages, is there? So we'll have rich tourists and anthropologists visiting and watching us, both of who want to keep a low profile so they can study us and keep it real.
4) Why would the aliens communicate using our tech? Why EM radiation? If you can modulate gravity or have a really great sensitive high bandwidth neutrino detector, why use crappy old fashioned EM waves? Just because its the best we could invent in the 1800s doesn't mean it'll always be the best. Its quite possible we currently sitting on a trunk line for intergalactic cable TV using gravitons and/or neutrinos and don't even have the tech (yet) to tell. This is assuming a future telecom tech is something we have even heard about or can currently imagine. Some string theory thing which will be invented in 2163 might be the basis of the intergalactic "wifi" internet and we can't even imagine it yet.
5) Expansion and exploration is taken as granted by an expansion oriented industrial planet, for obvious reasons. I'm not sure it would be by a post singularity civilization. Once you've got your quantum computers and dyson sphere, do you need to conqueror a galaxy? The number of homebodies and hermits vastly exceeds the number of explorers and that's missing from the equation.
Are these CFCs made from exotic kinds of matter?
Yes. This is another "talk to a chemist". Ur doing it wrong, when halogens accumulate in your ozone layer. There seems to be no way to get them there, in extreme bulk, other than CFC release on the surface, or maybe some kind of insane doomsday weapon, both of which indicate extreme industrialization and a certain lack of ecological concern.
A standard /. automotive analogy is car sized lumps of unoxidized iron with certain precise and consistent fractions of dissolved carbon found on top of strips of heavy petroleum fractions mixed with gravel is just too weird geologically and biochemically to be anything but the product of intelligent life. You just don't find those elements laying around in that physical configuration.
What makes you think that life on another planet won't have found some biological use for CFCs?
Oh man, talk to a chemist, they are inert, which makes things biologically complicated and the precursors are beyond nasty. For a good time google for Bromotrifluoromethane Synthesis (aka what you non-chemists would call "Halon") and imagine what it takes to make it both industrially and almost unimaginably via biosynthesis. Its not so much the final step that's the problem, but the precursors, processing the raw materials, etc.
Its probably a pretty good "dependency" marker indicating advanced stainless steel fabrication, extensive acid production industries, hmm I'd have to think. Biological tissue has severe issues dealing with fluorine ions, which is too bad.
Its not for lack of evolutionary pressure. Plenty of vessels and orifices would benefit by a native layer of teflon. Imagine the predator prey relations in a world of teflon skin. Some of the room temp liquid CFCs would superficially make a good replacement for that fluid in the bone joints (sorry not doc don't know its technical name).
Theres also some evolutionary pressure in that you'd need a species that eats flourite ore rocks (or at least stuff grown in its soil, or naturally heavily floridated water) AND in the halon example a biological bromine source... One or the other, OK, but at this time of day I can't think of a way to pull off both. Some kind of migratory coastal ruminant mammal? Um...
Also there's some thermodynamics issues, if you could pull off the synthesis in a cell, it would need to be a better idea than simply synth more ATP or hemoglobin or whatever else... Need to find a bio app where CFCs are more beneficial than anything else a cell can synth. CFCs are expensive to make so you need a good reason. Much as superficially silicon based brains "seem" more sensible than neuron based brains but its so hard to make a self reproducing factory the size of a typical mammal womb that its not happening any time soon.
To some extent thats why halon is such a good fire extinguisher around humans. Terrestrial biochemistry has almost no idea how to interact with it, so it pretty much doesn't. CFC suffocation is a zillion times more likely than CFC poisoning. I was told but am too lazy to verify that if you get CFCs into your blood your kidneys get somewhat confused.
My guess is insurance fraud reasons. So you want a new phone, report the old one stolen, get the official theft report from the cops, but are dumb enough to keep using the old phone to call the same people until you visit the local dealer (phone dealer, just another branch of organized crime) to get a replacement under your theft insurance contract.
In the old days this happened when you'd get a $1000 bill for calling guatemala for 8 hours... Um uh that wasn't me, uh, um stolen yeah thats it ... "so why, after the thief ran up the international bill, did the thief call your mom and talk to her for 15 minutes?" "...."
And why would they, if all you're doing is going in, looking at it, then buying off amazon.
Ah but I had a day off and would pay anything to walk out that door with an ethernet card. Local whitebox small dealer types are closed on Sunday. Its the "convenience store" model. If I wanted to pay $3 for a gallon of milk I'd go to the megamart 3 miles away and wait in line for 10 minutes, but I'll pay $4 to stop at the gas station convenience store 1/2 mile from home on the main road if I'm in a hurry
Ditto when I destroyed my bluetooth earpiece and I needed one for the next day, how will I listen to audiobooks and podcasts and music? Work in silence? Unthinkable!
Ditto when my cell phone charger broke during vacation 500 miles from home. I don't care if it costs 2x as much as amazon I need that %$&* charger right now! Not 2-day "prime" shipping or whatever. My battery doesn't last that long....
Several times I grin and bear it when I need a HDMI cable and order a $5 one from amazon because there is no way I can stomach paying $75 at best buy for the same cable. However if they were not so greedy, they could get maybe $15 from me if I was in a huge hurry, and 150% profit in the cash register beats a theoretical profit of 15000% on a sale that isn't going to happen.
They can stay in business a long time with that model, basically a really big "radio shack" with more items... This business of stocking 500 external hard drives and no ethernet cards isn't going to work.
Also, if I walk in, pick up the ethernet card of my dreams, and in a fit of happiness I might grab a DVD for my family. But now I know not to bother going there to buy "computer stuff" anymore, so they'll never get another chance to toss an extra thing in my basket. Now amazon gets a chance to tell me that people who buy a pci-e broadcom ethernet card often also buy a DVD of the movie "Brave" or WTF. Too bad so sad best buy, bye bye.
hmmn.. if intelligent aliens would have analyzed Earth's atmosphere 400yrs ago, as proposed, they would have dismissed it saying no life exists in our solar system.
In some ways that's easier because there is no requirement to only look once. They'd see all kinds of interesting atmospheric changes over a couple centuries, not just CFCs. Weathermen studying climate on distant planets will eventually be a growth industry.
You could have fun trying to list atmospheric changes over time. Hmm I'd say first you see lots of particulates from cruddy fire, like london smog in 1800. Then you'd see a lot of sulfur compounds. Then you'd see strange radioisotopes (probably too low concentration to detect remotely, but...). Then CFCs burst on the scene, accumulate for awhile, then stop accumulating. Meanwhile CO2, methane, and O2 ratios start getting weird, for awhile. Drought in developed ag land leads to dust bowls, so the more developed ag land you have, the worse air quality is during droughts. You could probably make environmental planning theory guesses about forest fire management over time based on how fast they burn out. Another good one would be blooming deserts, it takes industrialized civilization to do it quickly, however temporarily.
Give 'the system' a few year
I've been hearing anti-scada fud for about two decades and it never gets any better.
I suppose as agitprop the early 1980s movie "wargames" is pretty good anti-scada. Or claims that Kevin Mitnick can whistle into a telephone thus launching nuclear missiles. There was a cheesy hollywood horror/action movie in the late 80s or 90s that could basically be subtitled "misterhouse grows into a skyscraper and has a tantrum killing everyone inside". I distinctly remember a 6-million dollar man or 6-million dollar woman (a late 1970s psuedo-scifi tv show) which had a nuclear power plant scada attack, with a friendly computer that donated a 7400 series TTL logic chip to repair the magic prosthesis that was LOL funny at the time. There is also at least one anti-scada james bond movie, probably 80s era but I can't remember the details. Oh and there was a cheesy 80s "hacking" TV kids show perhaps the "whiz kids" or something that also had a anti-scada plotline.
There's about 50 zillion star trek episodes and movies which basically show a scada attack on a warship. Most notably when Kirk drops Kahn's shields remotely and pretty much blows his ship up in ST2. But there's about 49 other examples.
This would be a fun /. article... everybody troll the depths of your memory to build a timeline of anti-scada FUD.
False dilemma. One excellent security practice not being the sole practice necessary doesn't mean its not an excellent security practice.
I've never worked at a place without airgapped or at least tightly firewalled "IT" and "production"/"engineering" networks. I'm sure there exist places where the receptionist can install a toolbar or weatherbug on her windows PC and literally blow up the plant, but I've never personally seen or worked at one.
An important point is its a general class of software. /. analogy would be journalists reporting exploits in "web browsing" when they really mean specific (ancient) versions of MSIE.
A great
So if your SCADA software is listed above, I'd sweat. If not, eh.
A good working definition is its like a robot that doesn't move, externally anyway.
Yeah but that's the danger of hyperoptimization. If you paint yourself into a tiny corner, then you're stuck in a corner, and there's no guarantee that every mobo in the future will have more features. Good luck buying a modern mobo with 4 onboard RS-232 ports or... pretty much any ISA at all.
So I'm not seeing a soldered on CPU hurting hyperoptimization as a hobby. You'll still get to paint yourself into a corner to your hearts content, its just that the paintbrush now comes shrinkwrapped with each paint can.
Also your specs seem really low. I didn't even see a board that low when I did my upgrade. Maybe there is some specialist whitebox supplier who only makes 2-ram-slot mobos but ... wow.
Dell charges incrementally more money for better CPUs and offers a half-dozen choices on most systems. They would probably handle this at board assembly versus soldering on the CPU.
Probably more likely fusible links in the CPU or the equivalent, you only pay for 4 cores the other 4 on the die get zapped. Or a windows only "driver" to authenticate what clock speed you paid for every 5 minutes or it drops to the minimum speed. This is all stuff thats been done before in different processing markets (embedded, mainframes, etc). Unfortunately whatever IBM did with the Z-series mainframes and unisys etc etc is probably falling off patent
How does it cut costs? Are the tiny pins really that expensive? What are they made out of? Platnium?
I can't speak for every CPU and socket ever made but I can speak generically that in the electronics biz gold plate is not unusual on sockets although rare on IC pins.
The real killer is capacitance. Just dump more current, yeah right.
Always. I have never owned a PC in which I have not upgraded the CPU at least once.
Post-PC AT era, about the same here for my main machines. Side / secondary machines are not upgraded, treated as appliance. I'm guessing we do about the same upgrade protocol... and the average /.er is getting VERY confused how this works.
Example. Go back about a decade. My old P-2 or P-75 or whatever was feeling slow and AMD's mainline socket at the time was the 939. Not new, but not obsolete either. ... I don't remember but it was the strategy above, a decent mobo with the cheapest compatible CPU, years later to be upgraded to the fastest CPU in that socket ever made...
That year I buy a decent 939 mobo and the cheapest slowest POS 939 CPU that is available.
A couple years later, they release the 940 socket probably purely to segment the market or whatever. Anyway, 939 CPUs get CHEAP and I buy the fastest one ever made for like $100, which actually performs pretty well compared to a cheap 940.
A couple years later the Worlds Fastest 939 CPU was getting a tad slow, so
Yes, I have run into exciting problems like the mobo BIOS needs to be upgraded to the newest version to even recognize the "worlds fastest X" cpu which didn't even exist as a cpu revision number when the mobo was made. Been there, had to reinstall the old cpu, upgrade the bios, and re-re-install the new cpu.
No, you can't really afford to do this with cutting edge CPUs and always buy the most expensive one available every 3 months or whatever, that would be quite an expensive hobby, or at least a waste of time WRT optimization of fun per $. But if you pay attention to the market, you can maintain a spot above average for practically no money.
1) Never upgrade unless its slow. The CPU I mean, not the graphics card or whatever else.
2) Never buy a mobo with anything but the cheapest possible CPU
3) When that socket expires, wait until the fastest CPU for that socket ever made is about $99 then upgrade
4) Repeat for about 20 years (so far). I've been doing something like this since the 386 era.
Yes, but what if the motherboard you want only comes sold with a CPU you don't want, or vice-versa? This bundling will in practice reduce choice, as I doubt every combination will be offered.
There are different motherboards? Well, I'm sure there are different models, but different enough to matter? I just upgraded my basement fileserver / mythtv backend mobo and cpu because I wanted hardware virt support for some experiments. All I paid attention to was the CPU details to make sure I got a CPU with hardware virt, which I did and it works quite well...the mobo is just a bridge between the power supply and cpu, and its got some peripherals hanging off it like ethernet and SATA...
Seriously is there anything worth shopping for in a mobo?
That file naming convention is too predictable. Around here we use names like:
winter-project
nov-15-project
project-2.0
11.05.12-project
project-somebodys-name
Which one is the most recent? Oh look at the last modified date for the file, of course.