This article turned into an Apple discussion. But I don't see a single recommendation for laptops.
I just replaced my pre-retina MBP 17" as well, but it was easy for me because I hardly used OS X on it. My MBP was a neat laptop because it could also boot OS X if I wanted it too. I enjoyed going somewhere, popping it open, and booting to Windows. It was like a practical joke: look my toaster is actually a dishwasher! But I never had a reason to use OS X, other than to cross-compile something just to show "hey, this builds and runs on OS X! Neat!" I tried, but I didn't find it so compelling that it was worth giving up on the entire world just to be there. That decision freed me a lot, and you should consider it.
I angsted for months over the new MacBooks. They just weren't what I wanted. Was I being too old-school and just not "getting it?" But I finally decided that if, for some reason, I really need to build on OS X, I'll just buy a cheap mac to test it on. There's no point in struggling and angsting over the hardware when there are thousands of fine Windows + *nix machines out there that meet my needs for price and maintainability.
I assume you do this after you used Newegg to search for the item. Because Amazon's search engine doesn't have 1% of the power that Newegg's has. I can't go to Amazon and find out which video cards use a 4-pin power connector versus a 6-pin. Stuff like that is what makes newegg awesome.
Didnt Elon Musk help found a solar firm (solarcity) about thats going strong, apparently with no government help
No.
Everyone who buys from SolarCity gets a government subsidy to help with their purchase. There are federal subsidies, and local subsidies. Most solar companies will help you navigate the subsidies for free, because doing so is such a huge boost to their sales.
Before the solar subsidies, the market for solar panels was very limited. It was largely tToys, novelties, road signs, emergency radios, and 3rd-world countries. The technology has helped open up the field, but not enough that SolarCity could survive without them.
I work for a fortune 500 that uses Unisys in India for our helpdesk. I had 2 outstanding requests with them when I came down with a cold and had to work from home for a few days. When a heavily accented Indian guy called my cell phone telling me he was calling from the helpdesk, and that I could go to logmein.com and he would remote in and take a look, it almost sounded legit.
This could easily have fooled someone since I had outstanding incidents, we use an Indian helpdesk, they do use logmein, and they do have my cell phone number (which they might actually use since I was not at my desk at work). The primary remaining tip-offs were: 1) They didn't know my incident number and 2) My requests were for hardware issues not software. But if I had a problem like being unable to login to Outlook or access a network share, I wouldn't have had much reason to distrust them.
Hybrids have much smaller batteries than electric vehicles, so the risk of fire is lower. Also, I think the Prius uses a ni-cad not a li-ion, so they are less combustible.
While health insurance is moving away from personal responsibility, car insurance is moving more toward it. This probably makes sense because people are not at fault for many health conditions. But people are often at fault for driving accidents.
I wonder how long before we pay an insurance company for a car wellness program. Will they make sure I am checking my oil and rotating my tires regularly?
THIS is how to get new people coding on Linux! When I tool my OS course at UMBC we wrote a file system, and a few other tiddly bits. But actually looking at or modifying Linux kernel code would have been awesome!
By asking a question like "Where Does America's Fear Come From" your audience will presuppose that fear is the cause. But is that really it? I don't think the average American is afraid of terrorists. Things like anger, self-righteousness, and the military-industrial complex are more likely explanations. The "fear of terrorism" thing is an after-the-fact justification. Those in power need justification, and 9/11 fell right into their hands. I suspect that it is going to be a lot tougher to milk that for another decade. But the damage is already done, the power grab successful.
The article opens by citing a fictional character. These TV show characters are not indicative of actual Americans. They are overdone stereotypes. Let us not look at the caricatures to understand ourselves. The average American is, however, gullible and apathetic. That is why America was unable to stop the power grab.
'There are activities that I've worked on that make, you know, front page headlines. And I can say, I know all about that, I had a hand in that.
That's silly/ There are not many headlines in the last few years that the NSA is proud of. And if you work at the NSA and had a hand in something that made front page headlines, you probably aren't allowed to talk about it anyway.
My friends who work at the NSA hate when the NSA comes up as a topic, because it is never good news. They just have to hide their heads and walk out of the room. Sometimes that is because they are not allowed to talk about it. Other times it is because they are sick of hearing the flak.
I tend to agree. I am glad that someone is trying to create a better TCP. If they fail, we validate that TCP is a good idea. If they succeed, then we can have a better protocol.
If the QUIC exercise is successful, then the IETF should consider extending TCP to support the relevant features. For example, their point about multiple steams is a good one. Perhaps TCP should define an option to open N simultaneous connections with a single 3-way handshake. Existing implementations would ignore the new option bytes in the header so nothing would break.
If adding FEC really helps, then the same logic applies. Add it. If pacing really helps, then when you get an ack of 10 packets, pace the replies (although I doubt that would really help). But let us add these things only once they are proven to work.
You make a good point about poor congestion control causing wide-scale harm, but that problem exists today. Anyone can create any protocol they want, as long as it is built on TCP or UDP. This has always been the case and so far no one has managed to create a protocol that destroys the internet... yet.:-) Although no one as powerful as Google has tried. And certainly some protocols have brought down LANs due to inefficiency (Windows file sharing).
The slides refer to a feature called "pacing" where it doesn't send packets as fast as it can, but spaces them out. Can someone explain why this would help? If the sliding window is full, and an acknowledgement for N packets comes in, why would it help to send the next N packets with a delay, rather than send them as fast as possible?
I wonder if this is really "buffer bloat compensation" where some router along the line is accepting packets even though it will never send them. By spacing the packets out, you avoid getting into that router's bloated buffer.
From the linked slides:
Does Packet Pacing really reduce Packet Loss? * Yes!!! Pacing seems to help a lot * Experiments show notable loss when rapidly sending (unpaced) packets * Example: Look at 21st rapidly sent packet
- 8-13% lost when unpaced
- 1% lost with pacing
My issue was that geekoid is linking that will to succeed to his brutality, which makes him sound ambitious. It makes him a horrible person, when he was actually a compassionate person. He was not ambitious. He didn't hurt people to get ahead.
Where in the book do you see Ender striving to succeed? That wasn't his motivation. He never wanted to be the leader. He was just trying to get everyone off his back, and to like him enough to stop bullying him.
In Ender's physical fights, he was always defending himself against a superior opponent. Not trying to prove something. In the battle school showers, he would have been killed. It wasn't about success.
In the final test at battle school, and in the final battle against the Formics, Ender had given up and didn't care. It was Bean that won out in both cases while Ender was pretty much using a crazy suicide tactic.
So no, Ender was not driven to succeed. In the subsequent books, his only drive is repentance. Much like his drive for acceptance in the first book.
The Will Smith "I, Robot" has almost nothing to do with Asimov's stories.
I keep reading that, but I don't get it. Could someone explain the hate?
The "I, Robot" book was a series of short stories describing what a world might be like if we had intelligent robots. He created the 3 laws of robotics, then introduced various what-if scenarios where the rules all failed. It plays with these about humanity, religion, and morality. The take away is that you can't code morality using a few simple rules. It is complex and nuanced, and perhaps there is something special about "life" that can't quite be described.
The "I, Robot" movie was a single story, describing what a world might be like if we had intelligent robots. It included the 3 laws of robotics, then introduced a what-if scenario where the rules failed. It juxtaposes a with a "heart" but does not follow the 3 laws, against robots that cold and logical but are subject to the 3 laws. The twist, where the robots "evil" actions are actually a logical consequence of the 3 laws is just the kind of thing Asimov was trying to demonstrate.
So I conclude that it has a lot to do with Asimov's stories. The real question is, would Asimov have preferred that the movie tell the exact same stories as the book? Or would he have preferred a novel story that explores his themes further?
You must have gotten the book mixed up with another book. But it has been 30 years since the 1980s so that makes sense. Not sure where you got the revenge thing or the sub-human thing.
Ender's Game is about a reluctant hero, torn from his family and forced into the military where they required him to make brutal decisions to survive. He succeeds over his rivals and predecessors because his humanity made him a better leader. The irony of the story, and Ender's torment through the remaining books, is that he was seen as a killer when he, in fact, was not.
I liked Ender's Game until I read Ender's Shadow. Then, I *loved* Ender's Game. Ender's Shadow explains so much about why and how things happened, that it actually made the "twist" ending feel new again, even though you knew it was coming. I can only assume the author intended Ender's Shadow all along since it fit so well.
You listed IE-specific solutions, then complain that only IE supports them.
Want reliable proxy autodetect? Most other browsers break on DHCP based WPAD.
Use a transparent proxy. Those stupid proxy servers that you have to configure in each application suck. Most applications don't support it. Secure download sites don't work, secure FTP is unreliable. Even Microsoft's own MSDN download manager doesn't support a proxy server.
Want to deploy links, manage security zones, etc via group policy?
By "deploy links" I take that to mean "shove bookmarks into people's browsers" which is better handled by putting those links on the intranet site. That works with any browser, any OS, with less work. No special corporate policy required.
The primary purpose of security zones is so you can run ActiveX controls. No other browser needs special security settings for ActiveX.
Slashdot Mirror
This article turned into an Apple discussion. But I don't see a single recommendation for laptops.
I just replaced my pre-retina MBP 17" as well, but it was easy for me because I hardly used OS X on it. My MBP was a neat laptop because it could also boot OS X if I wanted it too. I enjoyed going somewhere, popping it open, and booting to Windows. It was like a practical joke: look my toaster is actually a dishwasher! But I never had a reason to use OS X, other than to cross-compile something just to show "hey, this builds and runs on OS X! Neat!" I tried, but I didn't find it so compelling that it was worth giving up on the entire world just to be there. That decision freed me a lot, and you should consider it.
I angsted for months over the new MacBooks. They just weren't what I wanted. Was I being too old-school and just not "getting it?" But I finally decided that if, for some reason, I really need to build on OS X, I'll just buy a cheap mac to test it on. There's no point in struggling and angsting over the hardware when there are thousands of fine Windows + *nix machines out there that meet my needs for price and maintainability.
I need OS X. And no other laptop will give me that.
And this is why some of us can never embrace OS X.
I assume you do this after you used Newegg to search for the item. Because Amazon's search engine doesn't have 1% of the power that Newegg's has. I can't go to Amazon and find out which video cards use a 4-pin power connector versus a 6-pin. Stuff like that is what makes newegg awesome.
Electric cars fill their gas tanks very quickly!
Didnt Elon Musk help found a solar firm (solarcity) about thats going strong, apparently with no government help
No.
Everyone who buys from SolarCity gets a government subsidy to help with their purchase. There are federal subsidies, and local subsidies. Most solar companies will help you navigate the subsidies for free, because doing so is such a huge boost to their sales.
Before the solar subsidies, the market for solar panels was very limited. It was largely tToys, novelties, road signs, emergency radios, and 3rd-world countries. The technology has helped open up the field, but not enough that SolarCity could survive without them.
I work for a fortune 500 that uses Unisys in India for our helpdesk. I had 2 outstanding requests with them when I came down with a cold and had to work from home for a few days. When a heavily accented Indian guy called my cell phone telling me he was calling from the helpdesk, and that I could go to logmein.com and he would remote in and take a look, it almost sounded legit.
This could easily have fooled someone since I had outstanding incidents, we use an Indian helpdesk, they do use logmein, and they do have my cell phone number (which they might actually use since I was not at my desk at work). The primary remaining tip-offs were: 1) They didn't know my incident number and 2) My requests were for hardware issues not software. But if I had a problem like being unable to login to Outlook or access a network share, I wouldn't have had much reason to distrust them.
Hybrids have much smaller batteries than electric vehicles, so the risk of fire is lower. Also, I think the Prius uses a ni-cad not a li-ion, so they are less combustible.
What are the bullets made of? Are they detectable? Also: Don't we need plastic guns if Magneto attacks?
baby robots?
This is interesting.
While health insurance is moving away from personal responsibility, car insurance is moving more toward it. This probably makes sense because people are not at fault for many health conditions. But people are often at fault for driving accidents.
I wonder how long before we pay an insurance company for a car wellness program. Will they make sure I am checking my oil and rotating my tires regularly?
How about we call it...umm.... network neutrality?
THIS is how to get new people coding on Linux! When I tool my OS course at UMBC we wrote a file system, and a few other tiddly bits. But actually looking at or modifying Linux kernel code would have been awesome!
By asking a question like "Where Does America's Fear Come From" your audience will presuppose that fear is the cause. But is that really it? I don't think the average American is afraid of terrorists. Things like anger, self-righteousness, and the military-industrial complex are more likely explanations. The "fear of terrorism" thing is an after-the-fact justification. Those in power need justification, and 9/11 fell right into their hands. I suspect that it is going to be a lot tougher to milk that for another decade. But the damage is already done, the power grab successful.
The article opens by citing a fictional character. These TV show characters are not indicative of actual Americans. They are overdone stereotypes. Let us not look at the caricatures to understand ourselves. The average American is, however, gullible and apathetic. That is why America was unable to stop the power grab.
'There are activities that I've worked on that make, you know, front page headlines. And I can say, I know all about that, I had a hand in that.
That's silly/ There are not many headlines in the last few years that the NSA is proud of. And if you work at the NSA and had a hand in something that made front page headlines, you probably aren't allowed to talk about it anyway.
My friends who work at the NSA hate when the NSA comes up as a topic, because it is never good news. They just have to hide their heads and walk out of the room. Sometimes that is because they are not allowed to talk about it. Other times it is because they are sick of hearing the flak.
I tend to agree. I am glad that someone is trying to create a better TCP. If they fail, we validate that TCP is a good idea. If they succeed, then we can have a better protocol.
If the QUIC exercise is successful, then the IETF should consider extending TCP to support the relevant features. For example, their point about multiple steams is a good one. Perhaps TCP should define an option to open N simultaneous connections with a single 3-way handshake. Existing implementations would ignore the new option bytes in the header so nothing would break.
If adding FEC really helps, then the same logic applies. Add it. If pacing really helps, then when you get an ack of 10 packets, pace the replies (although I doubt that would really help). But let us add these things only once they are proven to work.
You make a good point about poor congestion control causing wide-scale harm, but that problem exists today. Anyone can create any protocol they want, as long as it is built on TCP or UDP. This has always been the case and so far no one has managed to create a protocol that destroys the internet... yet. :-) Although no one as powerful as Google has tried. And certainly some protocols have brought down LANs due to inefficiency (Windows file sharing).
The slides refer to a feature called "pacing" where it doesn't send packets as fast as it can, but spaces them out. Can someone explain why this would help? If the sliding window is full, and an acknowledgement for N packets comes in, why would it help to send the next N packets with a delay, rather than send them as fast as possible?
I wonder if this is really "buffer bloat compensation" where some router along the line is accepting packets even though it will never send them. By spacing the packets out, you avoid getting into that router's bloated buffer.
From the linked slides:
Does Packet Pacing really reduce Packet Loss?
* Yes!!! Pacing seems to help a lot
* Experiments show notable loss when rapidly sending (unpaced) packets
* Example: Look at 21st rapidly sent packet
- 8-13% lost when unpaced
- 1% lost with pacing
Credit card companies could google all of the numbers for cards they have issued and take care of it themselves
That was his first suggestion.
Why would this be google's responsibility?
As he said in his write-up, it isn't Google's responsibility.
Good idea, but I think such devices should be fitted onto the school administrators, not the children. :-)
Okay, fair enough. He had a will to succeed.
My issue was that geekoid is linking that will to succeed to his brutality, which makes him sound ambitious. It makes him a horrible person, when he was actually a compassionate person. He was not ambitious. He didn't hurt people to get ahead.
Where in the book do you see Ender striving to succeed? That wasn't his motivation. He never wanted to be the leader. He was just trying to get everyone off his back, and to like him enough to stop bullying him.
In Ender's physical fights, he was always defending himself against a superior opponent. Not trying to prove something. In the battle school showers, he would have been killed. It wasn't about success.
In the final test at battle school, and in the final battle against the Formics, Ender had given up and didn't care. It was Bean that won out in both cases while Ender was pretty much using a crazy suicide tactic.
So no, Ender was not driven to succeed. In the subsequent books, his only drive is repentance. Much like his drive for acceptance in the first book.
The Will Smith "I, Robot" has almost nothing to do with Asimov's stories.
I keep reading that, but I don't get it. Could someone explain the hate?
The "I, Robot" book was a series of short stories describing what a world might be like if we had intelligent robots. He created the 3 laws of robotics, then introduced various what-if scenarios where the rules all failed. It plays with these about humanity, religion, and morality. The take away is that you can't code morality using a few simple rules. It is complex and nuanced, and perhaps there is something special about "life" that can't quite be described.
The "I, Robot" movie was a single story, describing what a world might be like if we had intelligent robots. It included the 3 laws of robotics, then introduced a what-if scenario where the rules failed. It juxtaposes a with a "heart" but does not follow the 3 laws, against robots that cold and logical but are subject to the 3 laws. The twist, where the robots "evil" actions are actually a logical consequence of the 3 laws is just the kind of thing Asimov was trying to demonstrate.
So I conclude that it has a lot to do with Asimov's stories. The real question is, would Asimov have preferred that the movie tell the exact same stories as the book? Or would he have preferred a novel story that explores his themes further?
You must have gotten the book mixed up with another book. But it has been 30 years since the 1980s so that makes sense. Not sure where you got the revenge thing or the sub-human thing.
Ender's Game is about a reluctant hero, torn from his family and forced into the military where they required him to make brutal decisions to survive. He succeeds over his rivals and predecessors because his humanity made him a better leader. The irony of the story, and Ender's torment through the remaining books, is that he was seen as a killer when he, in fact, was not.
I liked Ender's Game until I read Ender's Shadow. Then, I *loved* Ender's Game. Ender's Shadow explains so much about why and how things happened, that it actually made the "twist" ending feel new again, even though you knew it was coming. I can only assume the author intended Ender's Shadow all along since it fit so well.
Now I cam curious: could you expand on that? What else does one disable/enable on different security zones?
You listed IE-specific solutions, then complain that only IE supports them.
Want reliable proxy autodetect? Most other browsers break on DHCP based WPAD.
Use a transparent proxy. Those stupid proxy servers that you have to configure in each application suck. Most applications don't support it. Secure download sites don't work, secure FTP is unreliable. Even Microsoft's own MSDN download manager doesn't support a proxy server.
Want to deploy links, manage security zones, etc via group policy?
By "deploy links" I take that to mean "shove bookmarks into people's browsers" which is better handled by putting those links on the intranet site. That works with any browser, any OS, with less work. No special corporate policy required.
The primary purpose of security zones is so you can run ActiveX controls. No other browser needs special security settings for ActiveX.