Reminds me of Lose, er, Win 8. Please LEAVE "classic" for the large percentage of us NOT READING SLASHDOT ON A FREAKIN' "SMARTPHONE"? Your "improvement" givess my 23" monitor the resolution of a smartphone, and I really, *really* don't care for that.
It's bad enough what slashdot has come to, with ignorant, bigotted trolls commenting on well over half the stories, but this is absurd.
Yeah, right. What she says is *dead* on. Before I relocated here, I had a *really* good, actual family practitioner, who did *everything*. Now, I've got four? five? different doctors, and allegedly they're my "team" (for values of team approaching zero as a limit). I had to rant to make sure doc #3 talked to my "primary care". and they appeared to be annoyed.
They're all friggin' "specialists" who have no interest whatever in the human being in front of them, only in the one subset of that person's body that they're "specialists" in.
The first problem she'll have is getting the jerks to talk to each other.
And where is the training on ethics, and legal responsibilities, and how to get hold of an inspector general, and how one is allowed to blow the whistle when your PHB dreams up some utterly unConstitutional scheme?
Not gonna happen.
And, off-topic, with all the screaming and yelling about the "new" version (which I didn't even bother looking at - I'm still on "classic", and don't know why it needs to change), maybe it'll piss off enough of the brain-dead dorks and trolls who have nothing to say about an actual story.
mark "will we *ever* get past the endless September?"
There are huge reasons Texas gets hit on:
a) The textbook commision, that decides on the textbooks for *all* of Texas; publishers will meet their criteria, and
then peddle the same ones to smaller markets.
b) Who appointed that commision? Why, the lege and/or Gov. Goodhair.
c) Who allowed them to be elected, and not laughed out of the room? Did you vote against them? Well, then
it's partly *your* fault.
mark, naturalized Texan (Austin, '86-'94), and thus also entitled to make Aggie jokes
Is all you think about a) your home, and b) your car?
Solar power, and windmills, might cover *part* of a high-rise office building's needs. (You *don't* want to begin to think about the servers and their power supplies running 24x7x365.25).
HOWEVER, there's still manufacturing. Go read up on how aluminum, for example, is made.
We *can* massively cut down non-renewable power, Hell, even a 25% or more (and for those that don't read, Germany, I think it is, is aiming for a very large percentage of its power from renewable resources within 10 or 15 years. but there's still going to be a need for other sources, be they water, wind, or something better than nuclear as we know it (now, get some solar power satellites up there, and all bets are off).
Back in '87-'88, I worked in what's now called an open plan office. Five of us in one room, no dividers at all - desk, desk, desk on one side, and desk, desk on the other. Two of the people were on the phone at *least* 40% of the time to in-house people. After listening to some training tapes one week, I brought in music for my player (and I had to bring my own player). A day or so later, my manager, the VP, asked me if I was done the tapes. I told him I was, but that I had music, so I could concentrate better and improve my productivity.
He told me to take off the headphones and improve my productivity.
He had an office with a door he could shut, with real walls, not like my manager now, where the walls stop about 8" under the ceiling....
First thing they told us, when I first went to college, in an orientation, was to study, or do homework, etc, to ->find a quiet place where you wouldn't be distracted-
Open office is a lot cheaper. Managers can show that they've lowered costs, and so increased ROI, and so they should get more money....
And if you *really* think you do better work in an open office plan, then I predict that you also tend to work 50 and 60 hour weeks and up, and think this is "normal".
The same thing as lunch, breakfast, and yesterday's dinner, Pinky, soylent. Can we have it fried tonight, Brain? Sorry, Pinky, we don't have any oil, just soylent, soylent, soylent.... #insert Royal_Canadian_Mounted_Police.chorus
And if you buy the car, and have a title to it, then I can't see how they could enforce you enabling "features" by yourself. I can see them going after someone making a business of enabling tools... and even that, if they get you to sign something saying that the vehicle was out of warranty, or if you've bought it used.
True story: many years ago, we had a washer. It was what we could afford, but it only had one water level, no small/medium/large. One day, looking at a repair your own appliances book, I read something amazing: they said that it was cheaper for manufacturers to put the level control in all of them than to make some without.
I pulled off the faceplate of the controls... and there it was. I drilled a hole in the faceplate, and we had screwdriver water control.
There's such a thing as being too cheap for your own... oh, right, that's clearly a marketdroid idea for increasing ROI.....
mark
--- Libertarians believe everything any marketdroid says....
Ok, you want to talk about the Vietnam War... and how many of the assholes on slashdot are dissing you were even *born* then? And how many of them were in combat in, say, Iraq?
I'd guess that approaches zero as a limit.
Fact: after Dien Bien Phu, in 1954, the UN supervised the ->militaryallowed- the referendum to go forth, 80% of the country would have voted for Ho, who they viewed as the George Washington of their country, having led the fight, first against the Japanese during the War, then against the French. Fact: A hell of a lot of use did everything we could from getting drafted, and turning into cannon fodder in an illegal and immoral war. (Quote: Dick Cheney, as to why he didn't go in, though he was for the war: "I had other agendas.") Then there's party boy George W. Bush, who joined the Texas Air National Guard, then *deserted* for a year? year and a half? two years? (AWOL: absent without leave for more than 30 days)
Speculation: senior government officials under LBJ heard rumors that Nixon had agents in Paris in '68, during the peace talks, telling the North Vietnamese that they'd get a better deal with him as president, and so they shouldn't settle with LBJ.
Fact: Tapes released in the last 10 years have Nixon and Kissinger talking in '71, with Nixon saying he could end the war, and Kissinger advising him that if he did that before the election, he'd lose the election. Needless to say, there's *thousands* more names on The Wall.
Fact: Nixon expanded the war into Laos and Cambodia (and lied about it), and that they were killing a *lot* of innocence civilians (look up the estimated numbers of dead in 'Nam).
So yeah, Fonda was appalled by the murder allegedly in "our" name. So were a lot of us.
One last note: Tolkien was translated into a hell of a lot of languages... including Vietnamese. One unit of the South Vietnamese army chose, as their insignia.. the Lidless Eye of Sauron. Meanwhile, the other side, short guys, in black pj's, with bare furry feet.....
And I found Wargames *very* unbelievable (and I'd been programming professionally for several years at that time). I mean, first of all, the kid had what must have been something like $30,000 in early eighties dollars worth of computer equipment. And he was war-dialing... and in the days before "unlimited" calls per month, his parents never notice their bills...
Oh, and in the same time period, when most folks were *just* getting credit cards, and kids didn't get them, his 16 yr old girlfriend could pop what, many hundreds of dollars? A $kbuck, on airfare to fly them half-way across the US?
Right. Manhattan Project was *much* more believable... (Scene: the state science fair in NYC, other kids: hey, we get that you guys are in trouble, and we've put together what money we can all spare, which is enough to get you two bus tickets home to upstate NY.
mark "and people working for the DoD put huge back doors in mainframe code, during the Cold War...."
From the reports in the mainstream media the last few years, the reality of charter schools is this:
1. Some of them get to pick and choose which kids come in. Wonder why those have better scores?
2. The ones that must take anyone who applies show absolutly no better results (or grades) than
the public schools, and a percentage are *worse* than the public schools.
The real reasons that so many public schools are not good are:
1. The middle class ran away to the 'burbs in the fifties, sixties and since, so the tax base drops.
2. The folks in the inner cities, esp., have parent(s) working two and three jobs, and don't have time
to care about the school. Try living that way for a few years, and see how enthused you are at
the end of the day... esp. when you come home with maybe $10k or $12k/yr.
3. Another biggie: institutionalized racism. For example: in the sixties, a good friend of mine went to one
public high school in Chicago, and it was among the best in the city. When my son went there in
the late nineties, it was *terrible*.80%+ hispanic and black, and miserable teaching, and no
real opportutnities. One datum: my son took the *one* "computer course" the school offered. As someone
with a B.Sc in comp sci, and over thirty years of experience as a programmer, developer, and sysadmin
I will be glad to get in the witness stand in court and swear that that was *NOT* a "computer course",
it was what used to be a commercial course in typing. Period.
Let's see at least one-third of the school board being folks *from* those "bad neighborhoods", and let's see the school systems supported by income taxes, esp. corporate income taxes. Let them pay for what they get - an educated workforce - and you'll see change.
Oh, and NO CLASSES under college level with more than 24 kids. (Come on, bigots, let's see *YOU*, peronsally, deal with 36 or 38 teenagers every single school day, for years, and not quit.)
I just did a hack yesterday. One of our websites was running on perl CGI, and someone(s), years ago, inanely decided that they should write the logfile in cgi-bin. Now, selinux was extremely unhappy about that, so I moved the actual logfiles to/var/log/httpd, and made a symlink from the cgi-bin, and selinux is happy.
Why is this relevant?
Because, apparantly there are a number of perl cgi scripts for that website, and multiple places they write to the log from, and all of it's hard-coded, and one guy is (barely) starting to pick up, and we don't have a team to fix it. Budget for that? Hah. Hah. Hah.
And this is true of most of the places I've worked for decades. Someone write out of college, who barely knows what error handling is, whose largest program was a few thousand lines, and has zero responsibility, either job-politically, or monetarily, to assre that WHAT IS RUNNING BETTER KEEP RUNNING, complaining about "why doesn't everybody update to the latestgreatestwhizbang!!!" can and should be ignored, unless you feel like explaining the facts of life to them.
Hell, I'm trying (volunteering my time) to install some library software for an organization I belong to, and that's what it wants... and we're running an enterprise o/s (CentOS, since you ask), which doesn't *begin* to have the most current kernel, much less the versions of the utilities they want... having apparently built on the LATEST STUFF....
I'd love to see all developers forced to test their own software on a computer one to two generations old, on a stable o/s, and *not* inside the organizational network.....
Bitcoin true believers will tell you they aren’t—or aren’t completely—about the money. They dream of building a system free from the narrow interests of governments or the wealthy, allowing individuals greater freedom to move their capital around, whether it’s to avoid credit card fees, shop anonymously, or evade repressive regimes.
The fear is that an organization with piles of capital and not much idealism can buy enough computational might to corner the market and box out the individual miner. That may already be happening: Websites such as Bitcoin Watch that track the total computing power of miners have started to show large, mysterious spikes in capacity.
Even some Bitcoin entrepreneurs think mining has become a sucker’s game. Fred Ehrsam is a former Goldman Sachs (GS) trader and co-founder of Coinbase, a Bitcoin startup making wallet software that allows people to trade and store Bitcoins, and which recently raised $25 million in venture capital. Ehrsam is committed to Bitcoin but pessimistic about underfunded prospectors making any money. “This is very much a fad that is going to die soon, if it’s not even dead already,” he says. But that’s not the same as saying individual mining will end. He suggests that the next generation of miners might run their computers for ideological purposes—to support the currency and be a disruptive force in global finance—even if doing so has become unprofitable.
“Mining was supposed to be a democratized thing, but it’s now only accessible to the elite of the elites,” says Chris Larsen, CEO of Ripple Labs, which has introduced a virtual currency called Ripple. It’s similar to Bitcoin but without the mining. (The company gradually hands out increments of the currency to supporters.) “Hordes of brilliant engineers are raising money for mining equipment that regular folks can’t compete with,” Larsen says. --- end excerpt ---
at http:// www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-09/bitcoin-mining-chips-gear-computing-groups-competition-heats-up
And if you think venture captialists with serious engineers can't beat you, what happens if the NSA or China decides that it really, really isn't happy with what folks are buying with Bitcoins... and puts a real supercomputer, or *large* cluster, with tens of thousands of cores on Bitcoin mining? Would you like to trade that in for yuan?
Get something that, krufted up, will work... and the publishers will use it, rather than have readers decide what should be published. You like the crap packaged as "music" from the members of the RIAA? You'll see that in books, too....
Right, I see: so they're going from a waterfall development where they've got something working, to an agile development system, where they'll make daily changes, esp. ones to support the Tories' agenda.
Yup. That's going to work better than healthcare.gov 1.0....
If this happens, I want annual safety inspections everywhere.
Or maybe, when you are oblivious to the fact that your damn headlights are misaligned, and cocked up to almost straight ahead, I'll aim my highs at you.... or slow down in front of you, you stupid gits.
mark "let's not get started on blue headlights..."
And btw, my late ex, who was an engineer at Kennedy Space Ctr for 17 years, and worked on Station and Shuttle (and a ton of other things), used to tell me her ex-boss liked to "brag" that his degree was in typing.... and you wonder why NASA's in the state it's in, or why China's becoming the next superpower in space....
mark "actually, where I am now, my boss, his boss, and *his* boss, are all technical"
"The NSA May Or May Not Be Building A Quantum Computer That Can Decrypt Basically Anything"
- http:// www.seattlepi.com/technology/businessinsider/article/The-NSA-May-Or-May-Not-Be-Building-A-Quantum-5111156.php
The one machine that has all the keys is in a locked office, not connected to the Net.
Lessee, 1) do they *also* have an offsite backup of that info in a safe deposit box somewhere?
2) if not, and there's a fire, what happens to their company?
3) Who installed the lock on the door? Does the building engineer have a key? How does
he protect that?
4) Who cleans the room? And when they do, do they shove the electric motorted floor cleaner
up against the system?
5) What happens if the h/d fails?
mark "I *know* y'all can come up with more reasons"
And why is it that when I was in DOS, then Windows, finally Unix/Solaris/Tru64/Linux, at the slightest mention of any difficulty, or sometimes without that, is it that Macaholic fanboys instantly jump in to Proclaim the TRVTH that Jobs had three tables handed down to him from Babbage Himself, and how all other o/ses are second class citizens at best, and beneath notice (like part-time undergrads or roaches) at worst?
And they didn't change their tone when Macs went from OS9 to OS/X/BSD Unix....
mark, wondering if there's a 12 step program for Macaholics we can send them to, since they
have money to burn on overpriced hardware
I like the idea of deporting all of them to some third-world country that insists on living in the forefront of the 14th century. All the Republicans we send them will feel *so* at home.
That's the *only* vague use for it. If you're wired, there's absolutely no need for it. On CentOS/RHEL/Scientific Linux, service network start will do perfectly well.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of Lose, er, Win 8. Please LEAVE "classic" for the large percentage of us NOT READING SLASHDOT ON A FREAKIN' "SMARTPHONE"? Your "improvement" givess my 23" monitor the resolution of a smartphone, and I really, *really* don't care for that.
It's bad enough what slashdot has come to, with ignorant, bigotted trolls commenting on well over half the stories, but this is absurd.
mark
Yeah, right. What she says is *dead* on. Before I relocated here, I had a *really* good, actual family practitioner, who did *everything*. Now, I've got four? five? different doctors, and allegedly they're my "team" (for values of team approaching zero as a limit). I had to rant to make sure doc #3 talked to my "primary care". and they appeared to be annoyed.
They're all friggin' "specialists" who have no interest whatever in the human being in front of them, only in the one subset of that person's body that they're "specialists" in.
The first problem she'll have is getting the jerks to talk to each other.
mark
And where is the training on ethics, and legal responsibilities, and how to get hold of an inspector general, and how one is allowed to blow the whistle when your PHB dreams up some utterly unConstitutional scheme?
Not gonna happen.
And, off-topic, with all the screaming and yelling about the "new" version (which I didn't even bother looking at - I'm still on "classic", and don't know why it needs to change), maybe it'll piss off enough of the brain-dead dorks and trolls who have nothing to say about an actual story.
mark "will we *ever* get past the endless September?"
It needed 2G of RAM 5 years ago... and growing. emacs has handed the bloatware crown on.....
mark, remembering brief
There are huge reasons Texas gets hit on:
a) The textbook commision, that decides on the textbooks for *all* of Texas; publishers will meet their criteria, and
then peddle the same ones to smaller markets.
b) Who appointed that commision? Why, the lege and/or Gov. Goodhair.
c) Who allowed them to be elected, and not laughed out of the room? Did you vote against them? Well, then
it's partly *your* fault.
mark, naturalized Texan (Austin, '86-'94), and thus also entitled to make Aggie jokes
Can't think of someone more deserving.
As opposed to *firing* Clapper and stuffing him in jail for lying under oath to Congress.....
mark
Is all you think about a) your home, and b) your car?
Solar power, and windmills, might cover *part* of a high-rise office building's needs. (You *don't* want to begin to think about the servers and their power supplies running 24x7x365.25).
HOWEVER, there's still manufacturing. Go read up on how aluminum, for example, is made.
We *can* massively cut down non-renewable power, Hell, even a 25% or more (and for those that don't read, Germany, I think it is, is aiming for a very large percentage of its power from renewable resources within 10 or 15 years. but there's still going to be a need for other sources, be they water, wind, or something better than nuclear as we know it (now, get some solar power satellites up there, and all bets are off).
mark
They *do* think they're the new nobility.
Back in '87-'88, I worked in what's now called an open plan office. Five of us in one room, no dividers at all - desk, desk, desk on one side, and desk, desk on the other. Two of the people were on the phone at *least* 40% of the time to in-house people. After listening to some training tapes one week, I brought in music for my player (and I had to bring my own player). A day or so later, my manager, the VP, asked me if I was done the tapes. I told him I was, but that I had music, so I could concentrate better and improve my productivity.
He told me to take off the headphones and improve my productivity.
He had an office with a door he could shut, with real walls, not like my manager now, where the walls stop about 8" under the ceiling....
First thing they told us, when I first went to college, in an orientation, was to study, or do homework, etc, to ->find a quiet place where you wouldn't be distracted-
Open office is a lot cheaper. Managers can show that they've lowered costs, and so increased ROI, and so they should get more money....
And if you *really* think you do better work in an open office plan, then I predict that you also tend to work 50 and 60 hour weeks and up, and think this is "normal".
mark "I was never that young and stupid"
As opposed to buying the modules?
mark, whose oldest character is neutral, the *only* other choices being lawful or chaotic....
The same thing as lunch, breakfast, and yesterday's dinner, Pinky, soylent.
Can we have it fried tonight, Brain?
Sorry, Pinky, we don't have any oil, just soylent, soylent, soylent....
#insert Royal_Canadian_Mounted_Police.chorus
mark "and now for something completely different"
And if you buy the car, and have a title to it, then I can't see how they could enforce you enabling "features" by yourself. I can see them going after someone making a business of enabling tools... and even that, if they get you to sign something saying that the vehicle was out of warranty, or if you've bought it used.
True story: many years ago, we had a washer. It was what we could afford, but it only had one water level, no small/medium/large. One day, looking at a repair your own appliances book, I read something amazing: they said that it was cheaper for manufacturers to put the level control in all of them than to make some without.
I pulled off the faceplate of the controls... and there it was. I drilled a hole in the faceplate, and we had screwdriver water control.
There's such a thing as being too cheap for your own... oh, right, that's clearly a marketdroid idea for increasing ROI.....
mark
---
Libertarians believe everything any marketdroid says....
Ok, you want to talk about the Vietnam War... and how many of the assholes on slashdot are dissing you were even *born* then? And how many of them were in combat in, say, Iraq?
I'd guess that approaches zero as a limit.
Fact: after Dien Bien Phu, in 1954, the UN supervised the ->militaryallowed- the referendum to go forth, 80% of the country would have voted for Ho, who they viewed as the George Washington of their country, having led the fight, first against the Japanese during the War, then against the French.
Fact: A hell of a lot of use did everything we could from getting drafted, and turning into cannon fodder in an illegal and immoral war. (Quote: Dick Cheney, as to why he didn't go in, though he was for the war: "I had other agendas.") Then there's party boy George W. Bush, who joined the Texas Air National Guard, then *deserted* for a year? year and a half? two years? (AWOL: absent without leave for more than 30 days)
Speculation: senior government officials under LBJ heard rumors that Nixon had agents in Paris in '68, during the peace talks, telling the North Vietnamese that they'd get a better deal with him as president, and so they shouldn't settle with LBJ.
Fact: Tapes released in the last 10 years have Nixon and Kissinger talking in '71, with Nixon saying he could end the war, and Kissinger advising him that if he did that before the election, he'd lose the election. Needless to say, there's *thousands* more names on The Wall.
Fact: Nixon expanded the war into Laos and Cambodia (and lied about it), and that they were killing a *lot* of innocence civilians (look up the estimated numbers of dead in 'Nam).
So yeah, Fonda was appalled by the murder allegedly in "our" name. So were a lot of us.
One last note: Tolkien was translated into a hell of a lot of languages... including Vietnamese. One unit of the South Vietnamese army chose, as their insignia.. the Lidless Eye of Sauron. Meanwhile, the other side, short guys, in black pj's, with bare furry feet.....
mark
And I found Wargames *very* unbelievable (and I'd been programming professionally for several years at that time). I mean, first of all, the kid had what must have been something like $30,000 in early eighties dollars worth of computer equipment. And he was war-dialing... and in the days before "unlimited" calls per month, his parents never notice their bills...
Oh, and in the same time period, when most folks were *just* getting credit cards, and kids didn't get them, his 16 yr old girlfriend could pop what, many hundreds of dollars? A $kbuck, on airfare to fly them half-way across the US?
Right. Manhattan Project was *much* more believable... (Scene: the state science fair in NYC, other kids: hey, we get that you guys are in trouble, and we've put together what money we can all spare, which is enough to get you two bus tickets home to upstate NY.
mark "and people working for the DoD put huge back doors in mainframe code, during the Cold War...."
From the reports in the mainstream media the last few years, the reality of charter schools is this:
1. Some of them get to pick and choose which kids come in. Wonder why those have better scores?
2. The ones that must take anyone who applies show absolutly no better results (or grades) than
the public schools, and a percentage are *worse* than the public schools.
The real reasons that so many public schools are not good are:
1. The middle class ran away to the 'burbs in the fifties, sixties and since, so the tax base drops.
2. The folks in the inner cities, esp., have parent(s) working two and three jobs, and don't have time
to care about the school. Try living that way for a few years, and see how enthused you are at
the end of the day... esp. when you come home with maybe $10k or $12k/yr.
3. Another biggie: institutionalized racism. For example: in the sixties, a good friend of mine went to one
public high school in Chicago, and it was among the best in the city. When my son went there in
the late nineties, it was *terrible*.80%+ hispanic and black, and miserable teaching, and no
real opportutnities. One datum: my son took the *one* "computer course" the school offered. As someone
with a B.Sc in comp sci, and over thirty years of experience as a programmer, developer, and sysadmin
I will be glad to get in the witness stand in court and swear that that was *NOT* a "computer course",
it was what used to be a commercial course in typing. Period.
Let's see at least one-third of the school board being folks *from* those "bad neighborhoods", and let's see the school systems supported by income taxes, esp. corporate income taxes. Let them pay for what they get - an educated workforce - and you'll see change.
Oh, and NO CLASSES under college level with more than 24 kids. (Come on, bigots, let's see *YOU*, peronsally, deal with 36 or 38 teenagers every single school day, for years, and not quit.)
mark
I just did a hack yesterday. One of our websites was running on perl CGI, and someone(s), years ago, inanely decided that they should write the logfile in cgi-bin. Now, selinux was extremely unhappy about that, so I moved the actual logfiles to /var/log/httpd, and made a symlink from the cgi-bin, and selinux is happy.
Why is this relevant?
Because, apparantly there are a number of perl cgi scripts for that website, and multiple places they write to the log from, and all of it's hard-coded, and one guy is (barely) starting to pick up, and we don't have a team to fix it. Budget for that? Hah. Hah. Hah.
And this is true of most of the places I've worked for decades. Someone write out of college, who barely knows what error handling is, whose largest program was a few thousand lines, and has zero responsibility, either job-politically, or monetarily, to assre that WHAT IS RUNNING BETTER KEEP RUNNING, complaining about "why doesn't everybody update to the latestgreatestwhizbang!!!" can and should be ignored, unless you feel like explaining the facts of life to them.
Hell, I'm trying (volunteering my time) to install some library software for an organization I belong to, and that's what it wants... and we're running an enterprise o/s (CentOS, since you ask), which doesn't *begin* to have the most current kernel, much less the versions of the utilities they want... having apparently built on the LATEST STUFF....
I'd love to see all developers forced to test their own software on a computer one to two generations old, on a stable o/s, and *not* inside the organizational network.....
mark
Excerpt:
The Bitcoin-Mining Arms Race Heats Up
Bitcoin true believers will tell you they aren’t—or aren’t completely—about the money. They dream of building a system free from the narrow interests of governments or the wealthy, allowing individuals greater freedom to move their capital around, whether it’s to avoid credit card fees, shop anonymously, or evade repressive regimes.
The fear is that an organization with piles of capital and not much idealism can buy enough computational might to corner the market and box out the individual miner. That may already be happening: Websites such as Bitcoin Watch that track the total computing power of miners have started to show large, mysterious spikes in capacity.
Even some Bitcoin entrepreneurs think mining has become a sucker’s game. Fred Ehrsam is a former Goldman Sachs (GS) trader and co-founder of Coinbase, a Bitcoin startup making wallet software that allows people to trade and store Bitcoins, and which recently raised $25 million in venture capital. Ehrsam is committed to Bitcoin but pessimistic about underfunded prospectors making any money. “This is very much a fad that is going to die soon, if it’s not even dead already,” he says. But that’s not the same as saying individual mining will end. He suggests that the next generation of miners might run their computers for ideological purposes—to support the currency and be a disruptive force in global finance—even if doing so has become unprofitable.
“Mining was supposed to be a democratized thing, but it’s now only accessible to the elite of the elites,” says Chris Larsen, CEO of Ripple Labs, which has introduced a virtual currency called Ripple. It’s similar to Bitcoin but without the mining. (The company gradually hands out increments of the currency to supporters.) “Hordes of brilliant engineers are raising money for mining equipment that regular folks can’t compete with,” Larsen says.
--- end excerpt ---
at http: // www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-09/bitcoin-mining-chips-gear-computing-groups-competition-heats-up
And if you think venture captialists with serious engineers can't beat you, what happens if the NSA or China decides that it really, really isn't happy with what folks are buying with Bitcoins... and puts a real supercomputer, or *large* cluster, with tens of thousands of cores on Bitcoin mining? Would you like to trade that in for yuan?
mark
Get something that, krufted up, will work... and the publishers will use it, rather than have readers decide what should be published. You like the crap packaged as "music" from the members of the RIAA? You'll see that in books, too....
mark
Right, I see: so they're going from a waterfall development where they've got something working, to an agile development system, where they'll make daily changes, esp. ones to support the Tories' agenda.
Yup. That's going to work better than healthcare.gov 1.0....
mark "why, no, I'm *not* an agile fan"
If this happens, I want annual safety inspections everywhere.
Or maybe, when you are oblivious to the fact that your damn headlights are misaligned, and cocked up to almost straight ahead, I'll aim my highs at you.... or slow down in front of you, you stupid gits.
mark "let's not get started on blue headlights..."
Or Dilbert's PHB wouldn't be such an archetype.
And btw, my late ex, who was an engineer at Kennedy Space Ctr for 17 years, and worked on Station and Shuttle (and a ton of other things), used to tell me her ex-boss liked to "brag" that his degree was in typing.... and you wonder why NASA's in the state it's in, or why China's becoming the next superpower in space....
mark "actually, where I am now, my boss, his boss, and *his* boss, are all technical"
"The NSA May Or May Not Be Building A Quantum Computer That Can Decrypt Basically Anything" // www.seattlepi.com/technology/businessinsider/article/The-NSA-May-Or-May-Not-Be-Building-A-Quantum-5111156.php
- http:
mark
The one machine that has all the keys is in a locked office, not connected to the Net.
Lessee, 1) do they *also* have an offsite backup of that info in a safe deposit box somewhere?
2) if not, and there's a fire, what happens to their company?
3) Who installed the lock on the door? Does the building engineer have a key? How does
he protect that?
4) Who cleans the room? And when they do, do they shove the electric motorted floor cleaner
up against the system?
5) What happens if the h/d fails?
mark "I *know* y'all can come up with more reasons"
And why is it that when I was in DOS, then Windows, finally Unix/Solaris/Tru64/Linux, at the slightest mention of any difficulty, or sometimes without that, is it that Macaholic fanboys instantly jump in to Proclaim the TRVTH that Jobs had three tables handed down to him from Babbage Himself, and how all other o/ses are second class citizens at best, and beneath notice (like part-time undergrads or roaches) at worst?
And they didn't change their tone when Macs went from OS9 to OS/X/BSD Unix....
mark, wondering if there's a 12 step program for Macaholics we can send them to, since they
have money to burn on overpriced hardware
I like the idea of deporting all of them to some third-world country that insists on living in the forefront of the 14th century. All the Republicans we send them will feel *so* at home.
mark
That's the *only* vague use for it. If you're wired, there's absolutely no need for it. On CentOS/RHEL/Scientific Linux, service network start will do perfectly well.
mark