But what will happen to Windows 2003 systems still in use after the cut-off date? Company Security warns us that the world will end, but they said the same thing when Microsoft stopped supporting Windows XP
Well the world isn't going to end even if you get hacked and your company goes out of business, so we're already in the realm of exaggeration. I think your question fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the problem. The issue is not, "Once the deadline passes, everything will suddenly and spontaneously explode." A big part of the issue is risk-- if there are any undiscovered vulnerabilities, those vulnerabilities will not be patched. Unless hackers have already stockpiled undisclosed vulnerabilities, it'll take some time for them to be discovered, and some of them won't be very serious or dangerous. However, any vulnerabilities that hackers know may not be discovered if there's less scrutiny, and it won't be fixed. This means an increased risk. That risk can be mitigated by shutting those machines off from the Internet. If you're going to do web browsing, using a up to date 3rd-party browser will mitigate the risk, assuming major browser vendors will support Windows XP.
So how much of a risk, and how much of that risk can you mitigate? It's hard to say. You're trying to assess the risk of an unknown threat exploiting an unknown vulnerability over an unspecified period of time.
To some extent, we deal with that kind of a risk all of the time. But here's the big difference: It won't get fixed. It might not seem like that big of a deal, and you might think, "We'll burn that bridge when we get to it." However, a huge, major vulnerability could be discovered tomorrow that makes your server open for any random hacker to take control of, and there will be no fix coming.
Now think about that for a second. You have a company with servers running an unsupported operating system from more than 12 years ago. Obviously, they're slow to move. They're not free with their budget. Or maybe none of those things are the problem, but the real problem is that you have a huge legacy system that is impossible to upgrade, and so you've just been leaving it alone. Either way, there are reasons why upgrades have been so slow in coming. Do you think those problems are going to suddenly evaporate when there's a crisis? Do you think that company will make good decisions in a crisis, when their business-critical server is suddenly a free playground for hackers? Nope. They're likely to drag their feet and make wildly inappropriate decisions. When faced with a crisis, they'll make the same kind of bone-headed short-term decisions that got them into the mess in the first place.
And that's the real problem here. It's not really a question about whether 2003 will be severely hacked in the next 6 months. The real question is, is your company thinking ahead, preparing, and making sensible decisions. If they are, they will have had a plan and a budget for replacing these servers, both because the OS is losing support, and because it's a >10 year old server. If you don't replace a 10 year-old server because it's working, and you don't have to replace it, that might be a sensible decision. If you have a 10 year-old server and you are unprepared for the possibility that you'll have to replace it, then you're not a competent IT person.
So you think the range of comfortable temperatures for living is -22 degrees to 86 degrees Fahrenheit? Like -22 is equally uncomfortable with 86 degrees, and 90 degrees is completely unlivable? That seems... not even close. Sure, you can live at -30 degrees Celsius if your outside for very short periods of time, or if you're bundled up in good gear, but that's a pretty dangerous temperature. +30 degrees, on the other hand, is a lovely day for going to the beach.
I feel like it's worth noting that the PS3 came out in 2006, and XBox 360 came out in 2005. The original XBox 360 has an optional add-on for HD-DVD. That's how old these things are.
For me it's far more convenient to have zero degrees mean freezing and 100 meaning boiling. That has an impact on my life... Will there be a frost so I need to cover my plants? Will I have to get ice off my car in the morning? Is the food in my fridge getting too close to freezing?
See, this is where I could shoot back the same counter-arguments that I've been given in this thread. It seems easier because you grew up with it. It's not hard to remember 32 degrees is freezing. Meanwhile, knowing the boiling point of water (which is also not hard to remember) is of virtually no use in dealing with weather, which is the subject where most of us make use of temperature readings.
Someone else brought up time, which is I think a really great example of how silly it can be to try to make everything base-10 or base-100 simply in order to make calculations easier. We could, for example, come up with a new system of measurement where there are 100 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour, 100 hours in a day, and 100 days in a year. Really, though, there's no sane way to do that. You have to redefine either days or years to be something else that's not really convenient, and I'm not sure you could count seconds very easily.
Backing away from that idea, since it's silly, there have been attempts to do this, and they've failed because sometimes those attempt to make everything logical and mathematical don't actually make sense. You could say, "let's do 100 seconds to a minute, 100 minutes to an hour, and 10 hours to a day. It's 100k seconds/day as opposed to the 86k seconds in a current day, so it's at least the right order of magnitude. It's probably even close enough that "second" can retain its understood meaning of "about how long it takes for someone to count." It throws "minutes" and "hours" off quite a bit, though.
And though I would bet "you'd get used to it if you grew up with it," I would question whether it'd really be better. Maybe it's just because I grew up in this system, but it feels to me like minutes and hours are fairly appropriate units of measure for human life. There are certain kinds of tasks that take about a minute, others that take 10 or 15 minutes, or half and hour. One hour is about as long as a business meetings seems to be able to go on before everyone gets bored. It might not be the best unit of measure, but I suspect even though you'd probably "get used to it" and once you're used to it, it would "make sense", ultimately it wouldn't make any more sense.
And note that I'm not saying "Imperial units of measure are the perfect units, and metric sucks." I'm saying that it's a bit silly to assume that units of measure are inherently and universally superior because they're scientifically/mathematically derived to be "easy to use" for scientific experiments, since other units of measure might make sense for other human endeavors.
"Oh, you caught us with our covert, illegal spying program to monitor American citizens. Ok. We'll shut it down. Look, I'm pressing the buttons to shut it down. It's shut down now. I swear it is. Ignore the red light on that camera. That red light means it's not recording. We're definitely not going to start another covert, illegal spying program. If we did, I promise that we'd tell you all about it."
As someone who never used Fahrenheit it makes my head hurt. It feels like such a random arbitrary system (and yes I know where it came from).
Anything can seem random, arbitrary, and stupid to someone who is unaccustomed. My overall point is, most people who favor the metric system make arguments about it being more scientific, and therefore better. Temperature measurements are based on the freezing/boiling point of water, the relation between weight and volume are based on water. It seems like it's a great "objective" measurement system based on the properties of water, which is an important chemical.
My big point here is that it's not dumb to base systems of measurement on scales that are oriented toward people. We're the ones using them. Even the measurements of the freezing/boiling point of water to determine Celsius scales are based on atmospheric pressure at sea level-- which I don't mean to indicate that there's a problem, but only to point out that even metric measurements are, to some degree, anthropic. There's nothing wrong with measurements being anthropic.
And water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Nothing stupid and arbitrary about that! No sir!
All kinds of different things freeze at all kinds of different temperatures. What makes you think that temperature measurements are supposed to be primarily concerned with the changes in state of water. Also, to be pedantic, that's only pure water at atmospheric pressure, which means it's still anthropically derived. Let's not pretend that 0 degrees Celsius is some kind of objective scientific measurement.
I think time is a good example. Certainly mathematically it would make things easier to use base-10 measurements, but it's in many ways easier to use measurements of time that relate to how long it takes for a person to do certain things. You wouldn't suggest splitting a year into 100 units and calling each a "day". We live in cycles, and so our measurements of years and days are based on the astronomical cycles that govern our lives.
Meanwhile, seconds are approximate the speed of a person counting. Minutes and hours both feel like approximately appropriate intervals for certain sorts of human activities. I don't see the problem with our measurements being human-centric, since it's useful.
And just to say this preemptively, don't try to make a big distinction that days/years aren't "human centric" because they're derived astronomically. The reason we care about those astronomical cycles is because they correlate to our sleep cycle and our weather cycle.
I will also continue to argue that, while the metric system is great for math/science, it's actually not as good for some things in day-to-day life.
For example, measuring things in Kelvin may make a lot of sense in a lab, the Fahrenheit scale makes a lot of sense for measuring weather. In Fahrenheit, 0-100 degrees is roughly the range of temperatures that is habitable for people. And I know, it's not exactly the range of habitable temperature, but if there's a climate that spends a lot of time outside of that range, then people probably won't be very comfortable there. In Celcius, that translates into roughly -18 to 38, and Kelvin is 255 to 311. Those seem stupid and arbitrary by comparison. Also, if you measure only in 1 degree increments, Fahrenheit degrees are smaller and provide better resolution, though I suppose I can't tell the difference between 69 degrees and 70 degrees anyway.
But similarly, the length of feet and yards are pretty convenient for measuring spaces. Being a relatively average-sized man, my foot is about a foot long, for example. If I want to measure the size of a room, I can put one foot in front of the other and walk, counting my footsteps. In the end, I have a pretty good approximation. Measuring a person's height in feet also gives a range with pretty good resolution with adults typically being between 5 and 7 when you round. With meters, when you round, basically everyone is 2 meters tall.
I know some people won't quite get my point, or they'll say, "But metric is so much easier once you know it!" Really though, metric is only much easier when you're doing math. On a day to day level, most of us don't need to do enough math for it to matter.
Skyrim had a ton of quests, but I'd rather see fewer of them. Not because I don't like quests, but because they feel like they're holding my hand. I like having a really long term objective and then it's up to me to figure out the intermediate steps without any arrow pointing the way.
Well I think that's not the same was wanting fewer quests, but wanting less hand-holding in the quests. For example, I wouldn't mind if quests didn't always give map-markers telling you exactly where to go. Or maybe the markers could be more vague, like a shading on the map showing an area, or instructions like "Head to this town, and then go northeast" and the town is marked, but the location isn't.
Because I agree with you in the sense that, after a while, these games can just turn into "Go wherever the marker points you, have a perfunctory conversation with an NPC, and then go to where the new marker points." I don't like that. However, I do like having a list of missions that I can be doing, and I like a little hand-holding. I don't like spending hours trying to figure out where I'm supposed to go and what I'm supposed to do because the developers made it all unclear, but I do like exploring, finding things, and figuring things out for myself.
Different strokes for different folks. Personally, I don't agree with your list either. I'm not so fixated on vehicles, though I wouldn't mind, especially if they make a massive world to explore, which is one of the things I'd like to see.
But personally, I'm not too interested in teams and companions. I know that's blasphemy to some RPG fans, but I feel like companions typically just end up being something else to worry about. If you let the AI run them, then the AI is always doing something stupid, and they get themselves killed or stuck. If I control them, then it's just like, "Ugh, now you've just added a lot of un-fun work to my game-playing." I don't like grinding to level up, carefully planning my stats for lots of different people, etc. I just want to play through the story and explore the world. But that's me.
Similarly, I'm not super-interested in having very complex combat. Again, I know, blasphemy. I'm already going to spend a couple hundred hours in-game, and I don't really want to add to it by having to reload 50 times because I need to place one of my party members more carefully or give him different instructions. I'm exaggerating, but basically at this point I'm a 'filthy casual'. I have a fair amount of stuff going on in my life, and I don't particularly want to have to "get good" at a game through practice and grinding. I want something I can slip into, play for a while, get some fun gameplay and good stories, and then go back to my life.
However, I would agree that there's something to having things feel challenging. I think that's part of the challenge of game-design, making things feel challenging without simply being difficult. I love the feeling of just barely scraping through a battle, but I don't enjoy reloading because I failed.
Also, I do like the idea of character customization in the sense that you might have a stealthy/smart character, and therefore maybe you're precluded from also being a badass tank. Or you can be a tank, but you might also be dumb and incapable of sneaking. I think one of the things that the original Fallout games did well was to not only allow that kind of character customization, but to have those customization affect which things you were able to do, and how the story unfolded. There might be a mission where you have to fight an enemy, but if your speech/persuasion was really high, you could talk your way out of it. If you're a science genius, maybe you can hack the security system rather than doing a frontal assault.
I remember once completing a Fallout 2 game with almost no combat because I was sneaky, persuasive, and smart. I'd love to see that kind of thing return. Unfortunately, Bethesda doesn't do that kind of thing, so I'm not holding my breath.
What I really want to see, first is a huge world that has the feel of reality to it. Bethesda has been getting better at that, so I have some hope. Skyrim was pretty big and detailed. You could wander for a good long time before hitting the edge. But I'd like to see them do more of that. Make more interesting/unique locations, more unique items. More interesting characters. Avoid making it feel like the dungeon/vault is a designed game level with enemies placed at regular intervals and random loot in every corner, and more like a real place where people live.
Try to make the missions feel varied, rather than having a million, "Go in this cave and kill this person" missions or "fetch me 20 of this item" missions. Allow multiple routes to get to the end of the mission, either using stealth or persuasion or technical know-how or combat. Give you options on how to complete the mission, and have those decisions make a difference in the world, and make a difference on how people treat you.
I'd also like to see a crafting system that allows for more than "collect 3 [item A]s and 2 [item B]s to make an [item C]." Let the player change the look of their clothes, armor, and weapons in-game (without modding). Let the player cha
Putting aside conspiracy theories I believe there are 2 reasons governments would want access to data.
I'd argue that the real reason the government wants access is not some coherent conspiracy, but some relatively simple factors: People in the US were in a panic following 9/11.
People were scared. When people are scared, they panic. When they panic, they make stupid, short-sighted decisions. Remember when people in Iowa were taping plastic sheeting over their windows for fear of a chemical/biological attack? Remember how silly that was?
While the general populace were panicking, so were various public officials. They wanted to figure out how to make sure we were protected from terrorist attacks, and it was decided that we should do whatever it takes, even if it violated people's rights, and even if it was immoral. Even if it was stupid and didn't actually help, it didn't matter, because they wanted to do everything that it was possible to do. So they had the TSA searching your bags for nail clippers and liquid soap, and they had the NSA listening to your phone calls.
And yes, for many people behind these decisions, I think that was the motivation. They actually wanted to protect the US from attack, and also knew that they'd be fired (or lose their reelection) if they were seen to be failing to do everything humanly possible to prevent another attack.
In the mean time, lots of businesses made money from the ramped-up security, and those businesses are giving "campaign contributions" to the officials that decide whether to keep those programs. Plus, organizations like the NSA increase in power and prominence, and they'll use their influence to argue against rolling back such programs. There's also pressure from law enforcement, who have been using the intelligence for the prosecution of crimes unrelated to terrorism, and want to keep all the tools they can get. Even though it's a violation of people's rights, it doesn't seem so bad when you've been doing it for a decade. Aside from that, even if officials are in favor of ending these kinds of programs, it's still difficult politically because a lot of uninformed voters are going to see this as being "soft on terrorists".
So all those things add up, and nobody has the political will to end anything. Very few people even have the balls to come out and say that these programs should be ended.
Well I think the idea that "If you have a hole in a system, it will be abused by malicious people" is a big part of the reason I'm uncomfortable with the federal government having access to people's personal info. Yes, there's the whole danger of dictatorship and secret police and bla bla bla. It's a real danger, but it feels far off. Far more immediate is the danger of... just some asshole that works for the NSA or FBI abusing the access. For all the assurances that "we have access to your data, but we promise only to look at it after we get a warrant from a secret court," you know that there's some dude at the NSA looking through email from people he went to high school with, just for kicks. And that's creepy and all, but if that guy is also a bit crazy and malicious, he can do some damage to people's lives.
So ultimately, the danger of the Federal government having access to your data is less that the Federal government is itself dangerous, but having access to private data without sufficient oversight is going to be abused by individuals within the Federal government.
I'm not sure if you're joking, but even though your NUC is technically a desktop machine, it runs a mobile chipset. That's how they get it into such a compact package, by using chips and parts designed for laptops.
The one thing that you two probably agree with, the one thing that polls have shown like 80% if Americans agreeing with, is that the Patriot Act is nonsense and needs to be repealed. Yet, over 99% of the elected representatives seems to want the Patriot Act passed.
What do you imagine this is all about, then? Why do you think there's such a discrepancy?
My running theory is that it has nothing to do with political parties or oppression. The elected officials support the PATRIOT Act because they're cowards. They believe that the American people are stupid and fickle, and that even if 100% strongly support repealing the PATRIOT Act, those same people will still blame their elected politicians for "not doing enough" when the next terrorist attack comes.
And they're right to believe it. There will be another successful terrorist attack. There will. Someday, under some circumstances; it's only a matter of time. And when it happens, no matter what the circumstances are, the general populace will panic, and they'll do all kinds of stupid things. And the funny thing is, you might not realize this unless you really pay attention, but the general populace has no memory. It doesn't matter how much they disapprove of the PATRIOT Act now. As soon as there's a successful terrorist attack and they're scared and confused, they'll be absolutely irate that we aren't spying on more people more often. They won't have any idea why the NSA stopped monitoring all of our phone calls, but they'll be angry at anyone involved in putting an end to it.
I mean, if you talk to people now, nobody was ever in favor of invading Iraq. Go ahead and ask people, and they'll get upset and say they don't know why we went in, but it was a big mistake, and they always knew it was a mistake. Or they'll say they were tricked. But back when it happened, it was popular enough that representatives were afraid to oppose it. At least some of those people are mis-remembering. Same thing with all of the deregulation going on during the Clinton era, which everyone seems to have conveniently forgotten happened during Clinton's presidency. Everyone remembers that they economy grew under Clinton, but everyone forgets all the deregulation and Walmartization going on at the time.
People have no memory and no principles, so they're just running off of whatever they're feeling at the time. Our elected officials tend to base their policies on irrational fear and bigotry because those are the most consistent and trustworthy feelings.
I think it's a little too easy to say that the problem is "we're being too easy on children". And yes, I think that there's a sort of Mrs. Lovejoy "Won't someone think of THE CHILDREN" every-child-is-a-perfect-snowflake political correctness that is a problem. However, I also think it is important to be accommodating to the different needs of different children.
There's a larger problem, which is that we don't know what we're doing, and we don't even know what we're trying to do with education. Are we providing vocational training to get a job? Are we advocating a general liberal-arts-type education? Are liberal arts stupid and useless? I can't seem to find a consensus.
So instead, we speak broadly about accountability without specifying what people are accountable for producing. We make our kids take a crazy number of silly standardized tests, and put a lot of pressure on them (and on teachers) to perform well. It's not clear that the standardized tests are testing anything that we care about, especially since it's not clear what we care about. We're telling kids, though, that it's vital that they do extremely well on such tests, or else they're stupid useless people who are unfit to do anything but become a janitor, and "being a janitor" is described as a punishment.
It's not at all clear to me what we think we're doing, but what we're doing is awfully stupid.
I meant, what if there was a bug in the RAID 5 code that caused similar corruption?
Yes, I understood. And I way saying, yes, it seems clear that we would all care more if it were a problem with RAID 5.
I understand that you think "we would respond differently if this were RAID 5" is a sign of hypocrisy or something. But it's not really that.
It's a little like saying, "There was a design flaw in trash cans that cause items stored in the trash can to be damaged." And people respond by saying, "Yeah, well... that's not great, but it could be worse. Things stored in trash cans are usually things nobody cares about anyway."
And then you say, "Would you respond differently if this trash can problem were discovered in long-term storage bins?"
And so the response is, "Yes, we would care more about that. Of course we would all care more about that. Because people probably care about things in long-term storage bins, and usually put trash in trash cans. I understand that someone somewhere may be storing their valuable family heirlooms in trash cans, but they probably shouldn't be doing that."
Well, it mitigates the seriousness of the damage a bug should cause, assuming that people use RAID reasonably.
I'm going to go ahead and say that it mitigates the serious of the damage caused in actuality since most IT people entrusted with serious and important data aren't going to be that stupid. I mean, yes, I've seen some pretty stupid things, and I've seen professional IT techs set up production servers with RAID 0, but it's a bit of a rarity. There could still be some serious damage, but much less than if it were a bug affecting RAID 5 volumes.
Would you say the same thing if the bug affected RAID 1 or RAID 5?
I suspect not, since his point seemed to be that you shouldn't be using RAID 0 for data that you care about anyway.
It doesn't really make it ok for a bug to exist that destroys RAID 0 volumes, but it does mitigate the seriousness of the damage caused. And it's true: Don't use RAID 0 to store data that you care about. I don't care if the MTBF is long, because I'm not worried about the mean time, but the shortest possible time between failures. If we take 1,000,000 drives and the average failure rate is 1% for the first year, it's that that comforting to the 1% of people whose drives fail in that first year.
Photos aren't documents. Spreadsheets tend to be proprietary.
Nonsense.
Data needs to be organized by purpose (Record keeping = Primary / structured data) and Executive Summary Type data (human readable).
It depends on what the data is, and what and how it's being used. There is no "correct" organization, and no "one true way" to deal with data. I would not recommend going around cramming documents into some set organization without understanding where the data is coming from and what people hope to do with it.
Your organization may work for your purposes, within the constraints of the company or organization you work in. I've supported a lot of different types of companies over the years, and personally, I've never found a one-size-fits-all solution. In each case, it really pays off to start off with no assumptions, and figure out what will work for that specific situation.
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But what will happen to Windows 2003 systems still in use after the cut-off date? Company Security warns us that the world will end, but they said the same thing when Microsoft stopped supporting Windows XP
Well the world isn't going to end even if you get hacked and your company goes out of business, so we're already in the realm of exaggeration. I think your question fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the problem. The issue is not, "Once the deadline passes, everything will suddenly and spontaneously explode." A big part of the issue is risk-- if there are any undiscovered vulnerabilities, those vulnerabilities will not be patched. Unless hackers have already stockpiled undisclosed vulnerabilities, it'll take some time for them to be discovered, and some of them won't be very serious or dangerous. However, any vulnerabilities that hackers know may not be discovered if there's less scrutiny, and it won't be fixed. This means an increased risk. That risk can be mitigated by shutting those machines off from the Internet. If you're going to do web browsing, using a up to date 3rd-party browser will mitigate the risk, assuming major browser vendors will support Windows XP.
So how much of a risk, and how much of that risk can you mitigate? It's hard to say. You're trying to assess the risk of an unknown threat exploiting an unknown vulnerability over an unspecified period of time.
To some extent, we deal with that kind of a risk all of the time. But here's the big difference: It won't get fixed. It might not seem like that big of a deal, and you might think, "We'll burn that bridge when we get to it." However, a huge, major vulnerability could be discovered tomorrow that makes your server open for any random hacker to take control of, and there will be no fix coming.
Now think about that for a second. You have a company with servers running an unsupported operating system from more than 12 years ago. Obviously, they're slow to move. They're not free with their budget. Or maybe none of those things are the problem, but the real problem is that you have a huge legacy system that is impossible to upgrade, and so you've just been leaving it alone. Either way, there are reasons why upgrades have been so slow in coming. Do you think those problems are going to suddenly evaporate when there's a crisis? Do you think that company will make good decisions in a crisis, when their business-critical server is suddenly a free playground for hackers? Nope. They're likely to drag their feet and make wildly inappropriate decisions. When faced with a crisis, they'll make the same kind of bone-headed short-term decisions that got them into the mess in the first place.
And that's the real problem here. It's not really a question about whether 2003 will be severely hacked in the next 6 months. The real question is, is your company thinking ahead, preparing, and making sensible decisions. If they are, they will have had a plan and a budget for replacing these servers, both because the OS is losing support, and because it's a >10 year old server. If you don't replace a 10 year-old server because it's working, and you don't have to replace it, that might be a sensible decision. If you have a 10 year-old server and you are unprepared for the possibility that you'll have to replace it, then you're not a competent IT person.
Most Citi bikes go ununsed as far as I can tell.
I wonder if you're really paying attention. They seem to get used a lot as far as I can tell. I see people riding them all the time.
I personally would've rather seen cleaner, faster, quieter and more reliable subways than more advert-bikes.
It's not clear to me that it's an either/or sort of situation. The bikes probably cost a tiny fraction of what it would cost to overhaul the subway.
So you think the range of comfortable temperatures for living is -22 degrees to 86 degrees Fahrenheit? Like -22 is equally uncomfortable with 86 degrees, and 90 degrees is completely unlivable? That seems... not even close. Sure, you can live at -30 degrees Celsius if your outside for very short periods of time, or if you're bundled up in good gear, but that's a pretty dangerous temperature. +30 degrees, on the other hand, is a lovely day for going to the beach.
I feel like it's worth noting that the PS3 came out in 2006, and XBox 360 came out in 2005. The original XBox 360 has an optional add-on for HD-DVD. That's how old these things are.
For me it's far more convenient to have zero degrees mean freezing and 100 meaning boiling. That has an impact on my life... Will there be a frost so I need to cover my plants? Will I have to get ice off my car in the morning? Is the food in my fridge getting too close to freezing?
See, this is where I could shoot back the same counter-arguments that I've been given in this thread. It seems easier because you grew up with it. It's not hard to remember 32 degrees is freezing. Meanwhile, knowing the boiling point of water (which is also not hard to remember) is of virtually no use in dealing with weather, which is the subject where most of us make use of temperature readings.
Someone else brought up time, which is I think a really great example of how silly it can be to try to make everything base-10 or base-100 simply in order to make calculations easier. We could, for example, come up with a new system of measurement where there are 100 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour, 100 hours in a day, and 100 days in a year. Really, though, there's no sane way to do that. You have to redefine either days or years to be something else that's not really convenient, and I'm not sure you could count seconds very easily.
Backing away from that idea, since it's silly, there have been attempts to do this, and they've failed because sometimes those attempt to make everything logical and mathematical don't actually make sense. You could say, "let's do 100 seconds to a minute, 100 minutes to an hour, and 10 hours to a day. It's 100k seconds/day as opposed to the 86k seconds in a current day, so it's at least the right order of magnitude. It's probably even close enough that "second" can retain its understood meaning of "about how long it takes for someone to count." It throws "minutes" and "hours" off quite a bit, though.
And though I would bet "you'd get used to it if you grew up with it," I would question whether it'd really be better. Maybe it's just because I grew up in this system, but it feels to me like minutes and hours are fairly appropriate units of measure for human life. There are certain kinds of tasks that take about a minute, others that take 10 or 15 minutes, or half and hour. One hour is about as long as a business meetings seems to be able to go on before everyone gets bored. It might not be the best unit of measure, but I suspect even though you'd probably "get used to it" and once you're used to it, it would "make sense", ultimately it wouldn't make any more sense.
And note that I'm not saying "Imperial units of measure are the perfect units, and metric sucks." I'm saying that it's a bit silly to assume that units of measure are inherently and universally superior because they're scientifically/mathematically derived to be "easy to use" for scientific experiments, since other units of measure might make sense for other human endeavors.
"Oh, you caught us with our covert, illegal spying program to monitor American citizens. Ok. We'll shut it down. Look, I'm pressing the buttons to shut it down. It's shut down now. I swear it is. Ignore the red light on that camera. That red light means it's not recording. We're definitely not going to start another covert, illegal spying program. If we did, I promise that we'd tell you all about it."
As someone who never used Fahrenheit it makes my head hurt. It feels like such a random arbitrary system (and yes I know where it came from).
Anything can seem random, arbitrary, and stupid to someone who is unaccustomed. My overall point is, most people who favor the metric system make arguments about it being more scientific, and therefore better. Temperature measurements are based on the freezing/boiling point of water, the relation between weight and volume are based on water. It seems like it's a great "objective" measurement system based on the properties of water, which is an important chemical.
My big point here is that it's not dumb to base systems of measurement on scales that are oriented toward people. We're the ones using them. Even the measurements of the freezing/boiling point of water to determine Celsius scales are based on atmospheric pressure at sea level-- which I don't mean to indicate that there's a problem, but only to point out that even metric measurements are, to some degree, anthropic. There's nothing wrong with measurements being anthropic.
And the boiling point of water is different at the top of Everest. We're not talking about extremes here.
And water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Nothing stupid and arbitrary about that! No sir!
All kinds of different things freeze at all kinds of different temperatures. What makes you think that temperature measurements are supposed to be primarily concerned with the changes in state of water. Also, to be pedantic, that's only pure water at atmospheric pressure, which means it's still anthropically derived. Let's not pretend that 0 degrees Celsius is some kind of objective scientific measurement.
I think time is a good example. Certainly mathematically it would make things easier to use base-10 measurements, but it's in many ways easier to use measurements of time that relate to how long it takes for a person to do certain things. You wouldn't suggest splitting a year into 100 units and calling each a "day". We live in cycles, and so our measurements of years and days are based on the astronomical cycles that govern our lives.
Meanwhile, seconds are approximate the speed of a person counting. Minutes and hours both feel like approximately appropriate intervals for certain sorts of human activities. I don't see the problem with our measurements being human-centric, since it's useful.
And just to say this preemptively, don't try to make a big distinction that days/years aren't "human centric" because they're derived astronomically. The reason we care about those astronomical cycles is because they correlate to our sleep cycle and our weather cycle.
I will also continue to argue that, while the metric system is great for math/science, it's actually not as good for some things in day-to-day life.
For example, measuring things in Kelvin may make a lot of sense in a lab, the Fahrenheit scale makes a lot of sense for measuring weather. In Fahrenheit, 0-100 degrees is roughly the range of temperatures that is habitable for people. And I know, it's not exactly the range of habitable temperature, but if there's a climate that spends a lot of time outside of that range, then people probably won't be very comfortable there. In Celcius, that translates into roughly -18 to 38, and Kelvin is 255 to 311. Those seem stupid and arbitrary by comparison. Also, if you measure only in 1 degree increments, Fahrenheit degrees are smaller and provide better resolution, though I suppose I can't tell the difference between 69 degrees and 70 degrees anyway.
But similarly, the length of feet and yards are pretty convenient for measuring spaces. Being a relatively average-sized man, my foot is about a foot long, for example. If I want to measure the size of a room, I can put one foot in front of the other and walk, counting my footsteps. In the end, I have a pretty good approximation. Measuring a person's height in feet also gives a range with pretty good resolution with adults typically being between 5 and 7 when you round. With meters, when you round, basically everyone is 2 meters tall.
I know some people won't quite get my point, or they'll say, "But metric is so much easier once you know it!" Really though, metric is only much easier when you're doing math. On a day to day level, most of us don't need to do enough math for it to matter.
Skyrim had a ton of quests, but I'd rather see fewer of them. Not because I don't like quests, but because they feel like they're holding my hand. I like having a really long term objective and then it's up to me to figure out the intermediate steps without any arrow pointing the way.
Well I think that's not the same was wanting fewer quests, but wanting less hand-holding in the quests. For example, I wouldn't mind if quests didn't always give map-markers telling you exactly where to go. Or maybe the markers could be more vague, like a shading on the map showing an area, or instructions like "Head to this town, and then go northeast" and the town is marked, but the location isn't.
Because I agree with you in the sense that, after a while, these games can just turn into "Go wherever the marker points you, have a perfunctory conversation with an NPC, and then go to where the new marker points." I don't like that. However, I do like having a list of missions that I can be doing, and I like a little hand-holding. I don't like spending hours trying to figure out where I'm supposed to go and what I'm supposed to do because the developers made it all unclear, but I do like exploring, finding things, and figuring things out for myself.
Different strokes for different folks. Personally, I don't agree with your list either. I'm not so fixated on vehicles, though I wouldn't mind, especially if they make a massive world to explore, which is one of the things I'd like to see.
But personally, I'm not too interested in teams and companions. I know that's blasphemy to some RPG fans, but I feel like companions typically just end up being something else to worry about. If you let the AI run them, then the AI is always doing something stupid, and they get themselves killed or stuck. If I control them, then it's just like, "Ugh, now you've just added a lot of un-fun work to my game-playing." I don't like grinding to level up, carefully planning my stats for lots of different people, etc. I just want to play through the story and explore the world. But that's me.
Similarly, I'm not super-interested in having very complex combat. Again, I know, blasphemy. I'm already going to spend a couple hundred hours in-game, and I don't really want to add to it by having to reload 50 times because I need to place one of my party members more carefully or give him different instructions. I'm exaggerating, but basically at this point I'm a 'filthy casual'. I have a fair amount of stuff going on in my life, and I don't particularly want to have to "get good" at a game through practice and grinding. I want something I can slip into, play for a while, get some fun gameplay and good stories, and then go back to my life.
However, I would agree that there's something to having things feel challenging. I think that's part of the challenge of game-design, making things feel challenging without simply being difficult. I love the feeling of just barely scraping through a battle, but I don't enjoy reloading because I failed.
Also, I do like the idea of character customization in the sense that you might have a stealthy/smart character, and therefore maybe you're precluded from also being a badass tank. Or you can be a tank, but you might also be dumb and incapable of sneaking. I think one of the things that the original Fallout games did well was to not only allow that kind of character customization, but to have those customization affect which things you were able to do, and how the story unfolded. There might be a mission where you have to fight an enemy, but if your speech/persuasion was really high, you could talk your way out of it. If you're a science genius, maybe you can hack the security system rather than doing a frontal assault.
I remember once completing a Fallout 2 game with almost no combat because I was sneaky, persuasive, and smart. I'd love to see that kind of thing return. Unfortunately, Bethesda doesn't do that kind of thing, so I'm not holding my breath.
What I really want to see, first is a huge world that has the feel of reality to it. Bethesda has been getting better at that, so I have some hope. Skyrim was pretty big and detailed. You could wander for a good long time before hitting the edge. But I'd like to see them do more of that. Make more interesting/unique locations, more unique items. More interesting characters. Avoid making it feel like the dungeon/vault is a designed game level with enemies placed at regular intervals and random loot in every corner, and more like a real place where people live.
Try to make the missions feel varied, rather than having a million, "Go in this cave and kill this person" missions or "fetch me 20 of this item" missions. Allow multiple routes to get to the end of the mission, either using stealth or persuasion or technical know-how or combat. Give you options on how to complete the mission, and have those decisions make a difference in the world, and make a difference on how people treat you.
I'd also like to see a crafting system that allows for more than "collect 3 [item A]s and 2 [item B]s to make an [item C]." Let the player change the look of their clothes, armor, and weapons in-game (without modding). Let the player cha
Putting aside conspiracy theories I believe there are 2 reasons governments would want access to data.
I'd argue that the real reason the government wants access is not some coherent conspiracy, but some relatively simple factors: People in the US were in a panic following 9/11.
People were scared. When people are scared, they panic. When they panic, they make stupid, short-sighted decisions. Remember when people in Iowa were taping plastic sheeting over their windows for fear of a chemical/biological attack? Remember how silly that was?
While the general populace were panicking, so were various public officials. They wanted to figure out how to make sure we were protected from terrorist attacks, and it was decided that we should do whatever it takes, even if it violated people's rights, and even if it was immoral. Even if it was stupid and didn't actually help, it didn't matter, because they wanted to do everything that it was possible to do. So they had the TSA searching your bags for nail clippers and liquid soap, and they had the NSA listening to your phone calls.
And yes, for many people behind these decisions, I think that was the motivation. They actually wanted to protect the US from attack, and also knew that they'd be fired (or lose their reelection) if they were seen to be failing to do everything humanly possible to prevent another attack.
In the mean time, lots of businesses made money from the ramped-up security, and those businesses are giving "campaign contributions" to the officials that decide whether to keep those programs. Plus, organizations like the NSA increase in power and prominence, and they'll use their influence to argue against rolling back such programs. There's also pressure from law enforcement, who have been using the intelligence for the prosecution of crimes unrelated to terrorism, and want to keep all the tools they can get. Even though it's a violation of people's rights, it doesn't seem so bad when you've been doing it for a decade. Aside from that, even if officials are in favor of ending these kinds of programs, it's still difficult politically because a lot of uninformed voters are going to see this as being "soft on terrorists".
So all those things add up, and nobody has the political will to end anything. Very few people even have the balls to come out and say that these programs should be ended.
Like the federal government.
Well I think the idea that "If you have a hole in a system, it will be abused by malicious people" is a big part of the reason I'm uncomfortable with the federal government having access to people's personal info. Yes, there's the whole danger of dictatorship and secret police and bla bla bla. It's a real danger, but it feels far off. Far more immediate is the danger of... just some asshole that works for the NSA or FBI abusing the access. For all the assurances that "we have access to your data, but we promise only to look at it after we get a warrant from a secret court," you know that there's some dude at the NSA looking through email from people he went to high school with, just for kicks. And that's creepy and all, but if that guy is also a bit crazy and malicious, he can do some damage to people's lives.
So ultimately, the danger of the Federal government having access to your data is less that the Federal government is itself dangerous, but having access to private data without sufficient oversight is going to be abused by individuals within the Federal government.
I'm not sure if you're joking, but even though your NUC is technically a desktop machine, it runs a mobile chipset. That's how they get it into such a compact package, by using chips and parts designed for laptops.
The one thing that you two probably agree with, the one thing that polls have shown like 80% if Americans agreeing with, is that the Patriot Act is nonsense and needs to be repealed. Yet, over 99% of the elected representatives seems to want the Patriot Act passed.
What do you imagine this is all about, then? Why do you think there's such a discrepancy?
My running theory is that it has nothing to do with political parties or oppression. The elected officials support the PATRIOT Act because they're cowards. They believe that the American people are stupid and fickle, and that even if 100% strongly support repealing the PATRIOT Act, those same people will still blame their elected politicians for "not doing enough" when the next terrorist attack comes.
And they're right to believe it. There will be another successful terrorist attack. There will. Someday, under some circumstances; it's only a matter of time. And when it happens, no matter what the circumstances are, the general populace will panic, and they'll do all kinds of stupid things. And the funny thing is, you might not realize this unless you really pay attention, but the general populace has no memory. It doesn't matter how much they disapprove of the PATRIOT Act now. As soon as there's a successful terrorist attack and they're scared and confused, they'll be absolutely irate that we aren't spying on more people more often. They won't have any idea why the NSA stopped monitoring all of our phone calls, but they'll be angry at anyone involved in putting an end to it.
I mean, if you talk to people now, nobody was ever in favor of invading Iraq. Go ahead and ask people, and they'll get upset and say they don't know why we went in, but it was a big mistake, and they always knew it was a mistake. Or they'll say they were tricked. But back when it happened, it was popular enough that representatives were afraid to oppose it. At least some of those people are mis-remembering. Same thing with all of the deregulation going on during the Clinton era, which everyone seems to have conveniently forgotten happened during Clinton's presidency. Everyone remembers that they economy grew under Clinton, but everyone forgets all the deregulation and Walmartization going on at the time.
People have no memory and no principles, so they're just running off of whatever they're feeling at the time. Our elected officials tend to base their policies on irrational fear and bigotry because those are the most consistent and trustworthy feelings.
I think it's a little too easy to say that the problem is "we're being too easy on children". And yes, I think that there's a sort of Mrs. Lovejoy "Won't someone think of THE CHILDREN" every-child-is-a-perfect-snowflake political correctness that is a problem. However, I also think it is important to be accommodating to the different needs of different children.
There's a larger problem, which is that we don't know what we're doing, and we don't even know what we're trying to do with education. Are we providing vocational training to get a job? Are we advocating a general liberal-arts-type education? Are liberal arts stupid and useless? I can't seem to find a consensus.
So instead, we speak broadly about accountability without specifying what people are accountable for producing. We make our kids take a crazy number of silly standardized tests, and put a lot of pressure on them (and on teachers) to perform well. It's not clear that the standardized tests are testing anything that we care about, especially since it's not clear what we care about. We're telling kids, though, that it's vital that they do extremely well on such tests, or else they're stupid useless people who are unfit to do anything but become a janitor, and "being a janitor" is described as a punishment.
It's not at all clear to me what we think we're doing, but what we're doing is awfully stupid.
Yeah, that's RAID 10. If this bug affects RAID 10, then it's a bigger deal than if it only affects RAID 0.
It doesn't really make it ok for a bug to exist that destroys RAID 0 volumes, but it does mitigate the seriousness of the damage caused.
I meant, what if there was a bug in the RAID 5 code that caused similar corruption?
Yes, I understood. And I way saying, yes, it seems clear that we would all care more if it were a problem with RAID 5.
I understand that you think "we would respond differently if this were RAID 5" is a sign of hypocrisy or something. But it's not really that.
It's a little like saying, "There was a design flaw in trash cans that cause items stored in the trash can to be damaged." And people respond by saying, "Yeah, well... that's not great, but it could be worse. Things stored in trash cans are usually things nobody cares about anyway."
And then you say, "Would you respond differently if this trash can problem were discovered in long-term storage bins?"
And so the response is, "Yes, we would care more about that. Of course we would all care more about that. Because people probably care about things in long-term storage bins, and usually put trash in trash cans. I understand that someone somewhere may be storing their valuable family heirlooms in trash cans, but they probably shouldn't be doing that."
If you doubt such people exist, do an internet search or read some gamer forums.
I think you missed my point. I don't doubt such people exist. I doubt such people are generally safeguarding information that I think is important.
Well, it mitigates the seriousness of the damage a bug should cause, assuming that people use RAID reasonably.
I'm going to go ahead and say that it mitigates the serious of the damage caused in actuality since most IT people entrusted with serious and important data aren't going to be that stupid. I mean, yes, I've seen some pretty stupid things, and I've seen professional IT techs set up production servers with RAID 0, but it's a bit of a rarity. There could still be some serious damage, but much less than if it were a bug affecting RAID 5 volumes.
Would you say the same thing if the bug affected RAID 1 or RAID 5?
I suspect not, since his point seemed to be that you shouldn't be using RAID 0 for data that you care about anyway.
It doesn't really make it ok for a bug to exist that destroys RAID 0 volumes, but it does mitigate the seriousness of the damage caused. And it's true: Don't use RAID 0 to store data that you care about. I don't care if the MTBF is long, because I'm not worried about the mean time, but the shortest possible time between failures. If we take 1,000,000 drives and the average failure rate is 1% for the first year, it's that that comforting to the 1% of people whose drives fail in that first year.
Photos aren't documents. Spreadsheets tend to be proprietary.
Nonsense.
Data needs to be organized by purpose (Record keeping = Primary / structured data) and Executive Summary Type data (human readable).
It depends on what the data is, and what and how it's being used. There is no "correct" organization, and no "one true way" to deal with data. I would not recommend going around cramming documents into some set organization without understanding where the data is coming from and what people hope to do with it.
Your organization may work for your purposes, within the constraints of the company or organization you work in. I've supported a lot of different types of companies over the years, and personally, I've never found a one-size-fits-all solution. In each case, it really pays off to start off with no assumptions, and figure out what will work for that specific situation.