That's not a bad idea. I have a form that I fill out and make changes to, I then print it, save a copy in my safe, and email the form to my liar. Err.. Lawyer.
We have a whole distro, to ourselves... Well, and the rest of the rounding error that uses it. I don't know why it doesn't get more attention. It looks fine and it's blazingly fast on modern hardware - and still amazingly fast on older hardware. I'm sure it's eminently usable on your older system - even upgrading to 15.10 will still be okay. I don't want (or need) the features that come with Ubuntu but I do want the giant ecosystem and the myriad choices for support. I get that with Lubuntu without having to tweak much of anything. I even agree with most of the default software.
I guess my question is, what could/would I do with one as a layman with a passing (but growing) interest? Would this be a pricey replacement for a RPi or maybe a controller hub type of thing for a collection of RPis? I do have a project in mind to finally make use of these things - I've even got a half dozen of the RPi still sitting in their boxes (except for one that I opened and poked at) but I'm not exactly sure where to begin. Well, I know where I will begin - I'm just not sure that I should begin there. It's a long story...
From the other business owners that I know, I'm involved in a few now, they cite similar things. One owns a small computer repair shop with a few employees. Another, has maybe 500 employees in a bunch of fast food franchises, and the another owns a web hosting company - leases a few good sized cages in a couple of data centers in the US. All of them cite the same things. We talk about this extensively. I chose those few to mention specifically because their disparate. I know law firm owners, a guy who has a medical practice, etc... It could, easily, be the industries that I'm most familiar with or you're being lied to by your bosses. Take a look at some corporate filings for publicly traded businesses.
I'm a bit lazy so you can either search or believe me or wait until I am less lazy but I think the labor costs, as an itemized expense under overhead, is something like 17% averaged across the entire work force? Something like that, at any rate. Some higher, some lower, of course. The last time I found and cited the stats they were from BLS as I recall. It was not that long ago. So, while I did shunt the expense (included them as a cost) so doesn't every other business. You're not just buying parts when you buy a car, you're paying the labor also. It's a circular thing, I guess. The people I employed, for instance, paid higher taxes and paid a proportion greater than most to the municipalities that got improvements through their labor.
All-in-all, it wasn't that huge of an expense in the debit column and under the overhead header. I believe it's another 2-3% for benefits. We probably spent more on perks and office supplies than we spent on a secretary and even those were paid well. Bonuses don't come under labor costs, they're itemized separately. Those were a bit much but it is important to remember that without them you'd have no business at all. Paying bonuses for quality work is a very good motivator and allows people to share in the success of the company.
I was a child then. I stayed up late and watched a man walk on the moon - the first man, even. It was awesome. If you weren't there then you missed out on something you can never recapture. While not at all the same, it's as momentous as things like 9/11 - it's etched on you, forever (it seems), where you were when you heard about it or, in this case, watched it. I can even describe my pajamas. I'll spare you the details but they had feet and they were awesome but not as awesome as man walking on the moon. I got astronaut pajamas after that.
Along with the other skewed information you're posting in this thread, that one is just as silly. NASA was a centrally managed institution but they outsourced almost everything through bidding processes that also had to meet strict criteria. The Russians used competitions where they were they (both?) were from State run agencies. Anything, by some twisted metrics, can be called socialist and I'm pretty damned socialist in nature (albeit for different reasons than most and comparatively speaking). Stop with the bullshit misinformation, you're making the sane people look silly.
It's weird how you kids keep trying to twist history. To what end?
Along with the other skewed information you're posting in this thread, that one is just as silly. NASA was a centrally managed institution but they outsourced almost everything through bidding processes that also had to meet strict criteria. The Russians used competitions where they were they (both?) were from State run agencies. Anything, by some twisted metrics, can be called socialist and I'm pretty damned socialist in nature (albeit for different reasons than most and comparatively speaking). Stop with the bullshit misinformation, you're making the sane people look silly.
Not really, I don't think. They've got some rasinos and video poker sites but no table gaming AFAIK. That's one of the reasons that Atlantic City is as popular as it is? I don't think they're even allowed table gaming on the reservations but I could be mistaken. I don't live here but I've been here for err... Wow... Since late August. I've also spent a lot of time here in the past. I don't know all the laws or anything but I don't think they allow for table gaming or real casinos. They do have lots of betting on the ponies here. So, there's that.
You are wise in the way of the little old lady with her cup of change and vacant look in her eyes as she plies the glittering lights of Vegas. I've seen her, in the distance, but I dare not approach. I prefer table gaming, of course.
I'm not admitting to anything. I'm afraid that you'll have to speak to my lawyer if you want more information regarding any past dalliances that may or may not have taken place in the State of California.
Actually? I don't *think* that I've any more spawn meandering around the planet. It's not for lack of trying or for being overly cautious but I seemingly shoot a lot of blanks or get extremely lucky.
I'll just make sure she's got a subscription to Apple Care. She can call them. Thanks for the insight. I've never seen it advertised - probably due to my header information/user-agent which clearly identifies me as a Linux user. I kind of figured it was something along those lines - akin to the "you need codec to watch this movie" and appearing to be an official system application. It looked like a legitimate application as I was searching for it.
The call (I got several that day) involved her telling me that she wanted to install an AV. I asked why she'd want to do a silly thing like that. She told me that she did. I didn't argue. I recommended AVG as they have a free Mac version (I think it was AVG). She called back in a couple of hours telling me that MacKeeper wouldn't let her install it. So, I spent hours trying to figure out how to get MacKeeper to let her install it. It was no good. I then hit on some new search terms and followed those and figured out that MacKeeper was not, in fact, the GateKeeper thing that I'd heard about. (Why would I know?)
So, I called her back (again) and told her to uninstall it. She told me that that would be a bad idea. I hung up. She called back in about an hour and asked if she should really uninstall it. I told her that, at this point, I didn't really care if she did or not but that it probably wouldn't hurt anything to do so. I told her about a few of the links I'd read and she finally uninstalled it. Then, promptly, she installed an anti-virus application. No, I'm still not sure that she had good reasons for doing so. Note, good reasons. I'm sure she had *some* reasons for doing so.
I've had calls since and I generally am willing to Google for her, a little, but telling her to remove MacKeeper was eventful enough. The questions have gotten more bizarre as time has passed. I mean, yeah, I can sort of function in BSD-land? Technically, I own a MBP (somewhere, back home, and only if my daughter hasn't absconded with it). I did use an iPod for a while. I do own an iPad, somewhere - I think the daughter may have lugged that off too. I'm not actually sure where the iPod is but I don't think that one has been absconded with, it's like a 4th generation and only has something like 128 GB or something small - not prime "borrowing" material so the girl-child probably hasn't decided that she'd like it more than I would (I'm adjusted to this sort of behavior, it helps with my clutter, I guess).
I think the last time she called, the niece - not the daughter, she was hell bent on defragging. I suppose, technically, you get file fragmentation. While this is unlikely to be a problem (and the drive is an SSD, I do believe), I'm not entirely sure that any benefit gained from defragmenting a drive would be worth the read-write cycles. I told her this and that I knew of no way to defrag a drive in a Mac. She was hell bent on doing so, last I knew, and may well have accomplished her goal by now, for better or worse.
I don't know where she gets this lack of ability from. The rest of the family is fairly technical. She hung out with my kids and, well, those kids had me as a father - they've had a computer since they were born. She's always had a computer as well. I think she twatters her tublerinabookspace stuff and goes through about three email addresses a week. She's never, to the best of my knowledge, ever checked her email for anything other than account signups (I'm assuming she must) and has never actually configured an email client - to the best of my knowledge. If she were my child, I'd abort her. *stomps*
My kids are fluent, can program a little - including some scripting language work, and my daughter does use a Mac (and other Apple products) but she does actual work on it. She's finished med school and is now doing whatever it is they do when they meander off to slave in an ER for four years. The boy child, bless him, is actually quite a geek and gamer but he's smoking pot and sexing a beautiful native in Peru. He went there on a summer project and has ye
Our benevolent overloads, namely Slashdot, have decided, in their infinite wisdom, to move the links in some articles. To the right of the article title, in small font, is a name - it is where the story came from. You can now, also, click on that link and it will bring you to the article.
Brilliant work, those clever designers! It certainly didn't interrupt the user experience, cause confusion, or result in people making more informed comments. Their insight and ability to truly understand the user is often a source of great pride for these folks.
What really, really, impressed me most about this decision was their willingness to communicate the changes to the users in a meaningful and obvious way. I mean, yeah, they came right out and showed us in a nice clear post about this - it even told us why they were doing it. Not only that, they explained the many other changes. For a whole day, or two, I could click my username in the comments and be directed to the user control panel (and not to my profile's home page - that was insanely useful and a feature I'd been asking them to implement for months)!
Oh, I am over it. On the other hand, I think I donated like ten times that amount. At the time, I was hopeful. I got my money's worth of use from it. I just wish that they'd have kept it up. Given that I donate to lots of other projects, I'd probably still donate to Firefox if they needed money, spent it wisely, and created a good product. But no, over it is exactly what I am. In fact, that's why I mention it. 'Cause I'm done using them unless I'm somehow inconvenienced into doing so. It's bad enough that I don't go to BSD-land as I can't get a decent browser there. (At least, I've yet to find one.)
My company, sold now, did traffic modeling. We did allow Oracle a shot at our database but, well, after three months and absolutely zero success they insisted we owed them money and took us to court.
As for labor? Pfft... I don't pay that. You paid that. I bill for that, it's in the contract. The municipality has a choice to sign or not. I need quality employees who will do quality work because failure has huge penalties. So, employees get paid (albeit indirectly) by the contract. Things like other assets are more fuzzy. Racks of blade servers can't really be shoveled off as a single expense on one client. Those get amortized. They're damned expensive.
Consider also, if you will, that we were working with data sets that were nearing a full terabyte, by the late 1990s. Hardware was expensive... Like I mentioned, the copy room cost more than an employee. Contract with Xerox, or even a third party vendor, for consumables, maintenance, and replacements and then add in a couple of 8' plotters and that starts to build up - quickly. Rent on office buildings, then construction on two new ones, then renting three more and taxes?
Software? Heh... Oracle was pricey but failed to deliver. Everything cost a small fortune and bandwidth was obscene back then. I sold in 2008 and retired but, at the time, getting a decent SLA was insanely expensive. Sun, bless them, was at least nice enough to actually hold up their end of the bargain where support was concerned. They even helped us write special drivers, at one point. Have you seen an enterprise contract price for same day support from Sun? It's a larger figure than Oracle quoted and that was a yearly price.
No, no... The fleshy piles of meat that fed the computers were an expense but they were an asset that had a high return on investment and I could shunt those fees off much more easily. Their benefits were a bit pricey but that's okay. They were worth it. Sure, the rest has a return on investment and is a necessity but - all things considered - they people who worked with me were a good value for the dollar. Without them, I'd have had no business at all. They were priceless and what I paid was quite a bit less than their worth. On the budget, at the end of a quarter, they weren't even really in the top ten list as I recall. Just redundant network provisioning was expensive, never mind the bill for air conditioning.
Err... I could be wrong but fingerprint scanners don't actually store images these days. They store data points. Ridge x was in this location in relation to feature Y which is in this location compared to feature C, etc...
Someone on Slashdot works in the industry and explained it quite nicely a few years ago. It was verified by a few other posters. So, I could be wrong but that's my recollection in simple KGIII-acceptable-terms. They don't store images, don't compare images, etc... That's why your finger needn't be in the same spot every time and why the initial scanning takes more than one scan of the features. I understand you can also increase the verification process by scanning multiple times when the device is used to read the prints. So, out of 30 scans, 15 much match exactly and 10 must be within a certain subset, and 5 can bugger right off as being unreadable for any one of a number of reasons.
I'm quite certain that they used more precise verbiage. That's how it was interpreted and stuck with me. Like I said, I may be wrong but I kind of, sort of, doubt it - except maybe a small detail here and there but I don't think that I got any of those wrong. They were pretty eloquent and gave good information.
The NSA has a whole closet full of monkey wrenches. If not then they're buddies with the CIA who do have a whole closet full of monkey wrenches, ball peen hammers, and pliers. What were you saying about your clever and unbeatable system again? (My longest password is 15 characters. I suck. I'll tell them that they can't have it right up to the point where they get out the monkey wrench. After that, I'll give them said password - I might even give them yours.)
Using your metric, no computerized device, that is able to be powered on, is secure. While that'd be tough to argue against, there must be some reasonable middle ground for the sake of brevity. I think "more secure" is applicable and acceptable. Just like the TSA lock is more secure than no lock at all.
I've only been dating my girlfriend for like a month (I'm sure she knows the exact date). She already knows my phone pin. I don't mind. I told her. I wanted her to do something for me while I was driving.
I don't actually have any secrets on my cell phone.:(
If she wants to read my old texts then that's fine but I hope she deletes them for me when she's done. It'd be nice if she'd clear out my voice mail for me too, now that I think about it. Worst case? She finds out I have drunk and stoned friends. Oh no!!! I think she's already figured that out.
I don't do any banking on my phone or anything. I do have a debit card that's attached to a separate account. She's taken my car (worth much more than I keep in that account) and gone to the store with the card and thus either knows or has known the pin. If she runs off with my car and the, at most, $10,000 in that particular account then the car's insured and she can just keep the money - it will be less than I'd have just given her over time. If it turns out she's the type of person to do such then I'll consider myself as having gotten off cheap.
So, I guess, there's a point to having good security and a point to knowing what needs higher security and what risks you're willing to accept to accomplish a certain goal. Even my house requires a thumb print and a PIN. Well, or a key. If you just turn around and look up, you'll see the key hanging on the nail. My friends and the lady that cleans the house all know where the alarm box is and how to enter the PIN to turn that off before the alarm company is notified.
Why? Well, one keeps my house clean and the rest are friends who mostly go to my house to escape from their wives and families for a little while. I'm not even home and, given that it is 7:30 at night, there's probably someone in my house right now. I could probably look and see who it is, there are cameras in that area. I am a geek, at heart, after all.
It's about acceptable risks and what you want to accomplish. What are your goals, how much risk are you willing to give. I'd never rely on a fingerprint, exclusively, for anything important. It's fine for my house, that also needs a PIN. If not, there's a key if you turn around and look up. I'd rather you just use the key and steal my shit than break my door down and then steal my shit. It's insured.
When I was young, I could fit all my stuff into a car and just go. I was pretty happy with that. Then, life happened on a larger scale. The kids have come and gone and left stuff and I've accumulated so much that it's disturbing. I've got more computer gear than would fit in that 300 sq ft apartment - it'd fill the apartment's cubic volume, too. Hell, I can probably fill it up with just my clothing. I've got three freezers full of meat and a pantry full of preserved food. I'm not sure that I'd fit into this type of place. I'm also really certain that my collection of firearms is going to be a show-stopper.
Ah well... It's not for me but, once upon a time, I probably could have lived there comfortably. I spent a long time in barracks so I'll be okay with it. It sure as hell wouldn't be my choice to do so, today. Fortunately, I don't have to make that choice.
I don't game so I'm usually not bothering to stay near the bleeding edge with video cards. I can't really say. In my experience, however, anything that I do actually want to do is 'fast enough.' I watch documentaries. I don't even watch them so much as listen to them. Graphics aren't even all that essential. I can play HD and I do have a 4k monitor at home (several, technically) and those all work fine but the GPUs will all be about two years old by now, I imagine. I don't even own a BluRay device. Well, I don't have one hooked up. I did buy a write capable drive to store data but that turned out to be slow and, frankly, I already had better media storage options.
I could be fairly unique in my use patterns. *shrugs* So, there's that. I'm not Linux exclusively. Sometimes I use BSD in a VM, after all. Err... I think I have a Minix VM that I've booted a few times.;-)
For stuff like what I do? Meh... It works, I've not really noticed much of an improvement in overall speeds in years. The Intel, as mentioned, in my laptop is pretty fast. It's not an amount faster that makes me go, "wow." I don't think I've had a speed increase make me 'wow' in a long time. It's kind of sad.
Speaking as a 15-year Mac shareware publisher, most users dumb enough to install malware are too dumb to figure out how to disable Gatekeeper (on by default) to allow an unsigned (with Apple-issued certs) app to launch for the first time.
You have never met my niece. She calls me, on a fairly regular basis, to ask me to help her fix her Mac. I do not know why. Of all the times she's needed it repaired, I've only managed to solve the issue once. While I do, technically, own a modern Mac - I don't actually use it and I am pretty sure my daughter absconded with it when she last visited. So, I might not even technically own it any longer.
Anyhow, within a day of her first getting her Mac she had managed to install something called Mackeeper (I think?). It took some digging to find out that it was not some sort of malware protection but actually was the malware. How or why it got installed is a question I am not going to ask. It goes steadily downhill from there.
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That's not a bad idea. I have a form that I fill out and make changes to, I then print it, save a copy in my safe, and email the form to my liar. Err.. Lawyer.
We have a whole distro, to ourselves... Well, and the rest of the rounding error that uses it. I don't know why it doesn't get more attention. It looks fine and it's blazingly fast on modern hardware - and still amazingly fast on older hardware. I'm sure it's eminently usable on your older system - even upgrading to 15.10 will still be okay. I don't want (or need) the features that come with Ubuntu but I do want the giant ecosystem and the myriad choices for support. I get that with Lubuntu without having to tweak much of anything. I even agree with most of the default software.
I guess my question is, what could/would I do with one as a layman with a passing (but growing) interest? Would this be a pricey replacement for a RPi or maybe a controller hub type of thing for a collection of RPis? I do have a project in mind to finally make use of these things - I've even got a half dozen of the RPi still sitting in their boxes (except for one that I opened and poked at) but I'm not exactly sure where to begin. Well, I know where I will begin - I'm just not sure that I should begin there. It's a long story...
From the other business owners that I know, I'm involved in a few now, they cite similar things. One owns a small computer repair shop with a few employees. Another, has maybe 500 employees in a bunch of fast food franchises, and the another owns a web hosting company - leases a few good sized cages in a couple of data centers in the US. All of them cite the same things. We talk about this extensively. I chose those few to mention specifically because their disparate. I know law firm owners, a guy who has a medical practice, etc... It could, easily, be the industries that I'm most familiar with or you're being lied to by your bosses. Take a look at some corporate filings for publicly traded businesses.
I'm a bit lazy so you can either search or believe me or wait until I am less lazy but I think the labor costs, as an itemized expense under overhead, is something like 17% averaged across the entire work force? Something like that, at any rate. Some higher, some lower, of course. The last time I found and cited the stats they were from BLS as I recall. It was not that long ago. So, while I did shunt the expense (included them as a cost) so doesn't every other business. You're not just buying parts when you buy a car, you're paying the labor also. It's a circular thing, I guess. The people I employed, for instance, paid higher taxes and paid a proportion greater than most to the municipalities that got improvements through their labor.
All-in-all, it wasn't that huge of an expense in the debit column and under the overhead header. I believe it's another 2-3% for benefits. We probably spent more on perks and office supplies than we spent on a secretary and even those were paid well. Bonuses don't come under labor costs, they're itemized separately. Those were a bit much but it is important to remember that without them you'd have no business at all. Paying bonuses for quality work is a very good motivator and allows people to share in the success of the company.
I was a child then. I stayed up late and watched a man walk on the moon - the first man, even. It was awesome. If you weren't there then you missed out on something you can never recapture. While not at all the same, it's as momentous as things like 9/11 - it's etched on you, forever (it seems), where you were when you heard about it or, in this case, watched it. I can even describe my pajamas. I'll spare you the details but they had feet and they were awesome but not as awesome as man walking on the moon. I got astronaut pajamas after that.
Along with the other skewed information you're posting in this thread, that one is just as silly. NASA was a centrally managed institution but they outsourced almost everything through bidding processes that also had to meet strict criteria. The Russians used competitions where they were they (both?) were from State run agencies. Anything, by some twisted metrics, can be called socialist and I'm pretty damned socialist in nature (albeit for different reasons than most and comparatively speaking). Stop with the bullshit misinformation, you're making the sane people look silly.
It's weird how you kids keep trying to twist history. To what end?
Along with the other skewed information you're posting in this thread, that one is just as silly. NASA was a centrally managed institution but they outsourced almost everything through bidding processes that also had to meet strict criteria. The Russians used competitions where they were they (both?) were from State run agencies. Anything, by some twisted metrics, can be called socialist and I'm pretty damned socialist in nature (albeit for different reasons than most and comparatively speaking). Stop with the bullshit misinformation, you're making the sane people look silly.
Not really, I don't think. They've got some rasinos and video poker sites but no table gaming AFAIK. That's one of the reasons that Atlantic City is as popular as it is? I don't think they're even allowed table gaming on the reservations but I could be mistaken. I don't live here but I've been here for err... Wow... Since late August. I've also spent a lot of time here in the past. I don't know all the laws or anything but I don't think they allow for table gaming or real casinos. They do have lots of betting on the ponies here. So, there's that.
You are wise in the way of the little old lady with her cup of change and vacant look in her eyes as she plies the glittering lights of Vegas. I've seen her, in the distance, but I dare not approach. I prefer table gaming, of course.
I'm not admitting to anything. I'm afraid that you'll have to speak to my lawyer if you want more information regarding any past dalliances that may or may not have taken place in the State of California.
Actually? I don't *think* that I've any more spawn meandering around the planet. It's not for lack of trying or for being overly cautious but I seemingly shoot a lot of blanks or get extremely lucky.
I'll just make sure she's got a subscription to Apple Care. She can call them. Thanks for the insight. I've never seen it advertised - probably due to my header information/user-agent which clearly identifies me as a Linux user. I kind of figured it was something along those lines - akin to the "you need codec to watch this movie" and appearing to be an official system application. It looked like a legitimate application as I was searching for it.
The call (I got several that day) involved her telling me that she wanted to install an AV. I asked why she'd want to do a silly thing like that. She told me that she did. I didn't argue. I recommended AVG as they have a free Mac version (I think it was AVG). She called back in a couple of hours telling me that MacKeeper wouldn't let her install it. So, I spent hours trying to figure out how to get MacKeeper to let her install it. It was no good. I then hit on some new search terms and followed those and figured out that MacKeeper was not, in fact, the GateKeeper thing that I'd heard about. (Why would I know?)
So, I called her back (again) and told her to uninstall it. She told me that that would be a bad idea. I hung up. She called back in about an hour and asked if she should really uninstall it. I told her that, at this point, I didn't really care if she did or not but that it probably wouldn't hurt anything to do so. I told her about a few of the links I'd read and she finally uninstalled it. Then, promptly, she installed an anti-virus application. No, I'm still not sure that she had good reasons for doing so. Note, good reasons. I'm sure she had *some* reasons for doing so.
I've had calls since and I generally am willing to Google for her, a little, but telling her to remove MacKeeper was eventful enough. The questions have gotten more bizarre as time has passed. I mean, yeah, I can sort of function in BSD-land? Technically, I own a MBP (somewhere, back home, and only if my daughter hasn't absconded with it). I did use an iPod for a while. I do own an iPad, somewhere - I think the daughter may have lugged that off too. I'm not actually sure where the iPod is but I don't think that one has been absconded with, it's like a 4th generation and only has something like 128 GB or something small - not prime "borrowing" material so the girl-child probably hasn't decided that she'd like it more than I would (I'm adjusted to this sort of behavior, it helps with my clutter, I guess).
I think the last time she called, the niece - not the daughter, she was hell bent on defragging. I suppose, technically, you get file fragmentation. While this is unlikely to be a problem (and the drive is an SSD, I do believe), I'm not entirely sure that any benefit gained from defragmenting a drive would be worth the read-write cycles. I told her this and that I knew of no way to defrag a drive in a Mac. She was hell bent on doing so, last I knew, and may well have accomplished her goal by now, for better or worse.
I don't know where she gets this lack of ability from. The rest of the family is fairly technical. She hung out with my kids and, well, those kids had me as a father - they've had a computer since they were born. She's always had a computer as well. I think she twatters her tublerinabookspace stuff and goes through about three email addresses a week. She's never, to the best of my knowledge, ever checked her email for anything other than account signups (I'm assuming she must) and has never actually configured an email client - to the best of my knowledge. If she were my child, I'd abort her. *stomps*
My kids are fluent, can program a little - including some scripting language work, and my daughter does use a Mac (and other Apple products) but she does actual work on it. She's finished med school and is now doing whatever it is they do when they meander off to slave in an ER for four years. The boy child, bless him, is actually quite a geek and gamer but he's smoking pot and sexing a beautiful native in Peru. He went there on a summer project and has ye
Our benevolent overloads, namely Slashdot, have decided, in their infinite wisdom, to move the links in some articles. To the right of the article title, in small font, is a name - it is where the story came from. You can now, also, click on that link and it will bring you to the article.
Brilliant work, those clever designers! It certainly didn't interrupt the user experience, cause confusion, or result in people making more informed comments. Their insight and ability to truly understand the user is often a source of great pride for these folks.
What really, really, impressed me most about this decision was their willingness to communicate the changes to the users in a meaningful and obvious way. I mean, yeah, they came right out and showed us in a nice clear post about this - it even told us why they were doing it. Not only that, they explained the many other changes. For a whole day, or two, I could click my username in the comments and be directed to the user control panel (and not to my profile's home page - that was insanely useful and a feature I'd been asking them to implement for months)!
Yes, yes I am bitter.
Don't ruin it, you've got a good streak going.
I've an ex who is a midwife and is from California. Up in the Grass Valley area. Don't worry, she's too young to have been your mother's baby catcher.
Oh, I am over it. On the other hand, I think I donated like ten times that amount. At the time, I was hopeful. I got my money's worth of use from it. I just wish that they'd have kept it up. Given that I donate to lots of other projects, I'd probably still donate to Firefox if they needed money, spent it wisely, and created a good product. But no, over it is exactly what I am. In fact, that's why I mention it. 'Cause I'm done using them unless I'm somehow inconvenienced into doing so. It's bad enough that I don't go to BSD-land as I can't get a decent browser there. (At least, I've yet to find one.)
My company, sold now, did traffic modeling. We did allow Oracle a shot at our database but, well, after three months and absolutely zero success they insisted we owed them money and took us to court.
As for labor? Pfft... I don't pay that. You paid that. I bill for that, it's in the contract. The municipality has a choice to sign or not. I need quality employees who will do quality work because failure has huge penalties. So, employees get paid (albeit indirectly) by the contract. Things like other assets are more fuzzy. Racks of blade servers can't really be shoveled off as a single expense on one client. Those get amortized. They're damned expensive.
Consider also, if you will, that we were working with data sets that were nearing a full terabyte, by the late 1990s. Hardware was expensive... Like I mentioned, the copy room cost more than an employee. Contract with Xerox, or even a third party vendor, for consumables, maintenance, and replacements and then add in a couple of 8' plotters and that starts to build up - quickly. Rent on office buildings, then construction on two new ones, then renting three more and taxes?
Software? Heh... Oracle was pricey but failed to deliver. Everything cost a small fortune and bandwidth was obscene back then. I sold in 2008 and retired but, at the time, getting a decent SLA was insanely expensive. Sun, bless them, was at least nice enough to actually hold up their end of the bargain where support was concerned. They even helped us write special drivers, at one point. Have you seen an enterprise contract price for same day support from Sun? It's a larger figure than Oracle quoted and that was a yearly price.
No, no... The fleshy piles of meat that fed the computers were an expense but they were an asset that had a high return on investment and I could shunt those fees off much more easily. Their benefits were a bit pricey but that's okay. They were worth it. Sure, the rest has a return on investment and is a necessity but - all things considered - they people who worked with me were a good value for the dollar. Without them, I'd have had no business at all. They were priceless and what I paid was quite a bit less than their worth. On the budget, at the end of a quarter, they weren't even really in the top ten list as I recall. Just redundant network provisioning was expensive, never mind the bill for air conditioning.
Err... I could be wrong but fingerprint scanners don't actually store images these days. They store data points. Ridge x was in this location in relation to feature Y which is in this location compared to feature C, etc...
Someone on Slashdot works in the industry and explained it quite nicely a few years ago. It was verified by a few other posters. So, I could be wrong but that's my recollection in simple KGIII-acceptable-terms. They don't store images, don't compare images, etc... That's why your finger needn't be in the same spot every time and why the initial scanning takes more than one scan of the features. I understand you can also increase the verification process by scanning multiple times when the device is used to read the prints. So, out of 30 scans, 15 much match exactly and 10 must be within a certain subset, and 5 can bugger right off as being unreadable for any one of a number of reasons.
I'm quite certain that they used more precise verbiage. That's how it was interpreted and stuck with me. Like I said, I may be wrong but I kind of, sort of, doubt it - except maybe a small detail here and there but I don't think that I got any of those wrong. They were pretty eloquent and gave good information.
The NSA has a whole closet full of monkey wrenches. If not then they're buddies with the CIA who do have a whole closet full of monkey wrenches, ball peen hammers, and pliers. What were you saying about your clever and unbeatable system again? (My longest password is 15 characters. I suck. I'll tell them that they can't have it right up to the point where they get out the monkey wrench. After that, I'll give them said password - I might even give them yours.)
Well, you've got toes. Just tell 'em that you're fat.
Using your metric, no computerized device, that is able to be powered on, is secure. While that'd be tough to argue against, there must be some reasonable middle ground for the sake of brevity. I think "more secure" is applicable and acceptable. Just like the TSA lock is more secure than no lock at all.
I've only been dating my girlfriend for like a month (I'm sure she knows the exact date). She already knows my phone pin. I don't mind. I told her. I wanted her to do something for me while I was driving.
I don't actually have any secrets on my cell phone. :(
If she wants to read my old texts then that's fine but I hope she deletes them for me when she's done. It'd be nice if she'd clear out my voice mail for me too, now that I think about it. Worst case? She finds out I have drunk and stoned friends. Oh no!!! I think she's already figured that out.
I don't do any banking on my phone or anything. I do have a debit card that's attached to a separate account. She's taken my car (worth much more than I keep in that account) and gone to the store with the card and thus either knows or has known the pin. If she runs off with my car and the, at most, $10,000 in that particular account then the car's insured and she can just keep the money - it will be less than I'd have just given her over time. If it turns out she's the type of person to do such then I'll consider myself as having gotten off cheap.
So, I guess, there's a point to having good security and a point to knowing what needs higher security and what risks you're willing to accept to accomplish a certain goal. Even my house requires a thumb print and a PIN. Well, or a key. If you just turn around and look up, you'll see the key hanging on the nail. My friends and the lady that cleans the house all know where the alarm box is and how to enter the PIN to turn that off before the alarm company is notified.
Why? Well, one keeps my house clean and the rest are friends who mostly go to my house to escape from their wives and families for a little while. I'm not even home and, given that it is 7:30 at night, there's probably someone in my house right now. I could probably look and see who it is, there are cameras in that area. I am a geek, at heart, after all.
It's about acceptable risks and what you want to accomplish. What are your goals, how much risk are you willing to give. I'd never rely on a fingerprint, exclusively, for anything important. It's fine for my house, that also needs a PIN. If not, there's a key if you turn around and look up. I'd rather you just use the key and steal my shit than break my door down and then steal my shit. It's insured.
When I was young, I could fit all my stuff into a car and just go. I was pretty happy with that. Then, life happened on a larger scale. The kids have come and gone and left stuff and I've accumulated so much that it's disturbing. I've got more computer gear than would fit in that 300 sq ft apartment - it'd fill the apartment's cubic volume, too. Hell, I can probably fill it up with just my clothing. I've got three freezers full of meat and a pantry full of preserved food. I'm not sure that I'd fit into this type of place. I'm also really certain that my collection of firearms is going to be a show-stopper.
Ah well... It's not for me but, once upon a time, I probably could have lived there comfortably. I spent a long time in barracks so I'll be okay with it. It sure as hell wouldn't be my choice to do so, today. Fortunately, I don't have to make that choice.
I don't game so I'm usually not bothering to stay near the bleeding edge with video cards. I can't really say. In my experience, however, anything that I do actually want to do is 'fast enough.' I watch documentaries. I don't even watch them so much as listen to them. Graphics aren't even all that essential. I can play HD and I do have a 4k monitor at home (several, technically) and those all work fine but the GPUs will all be about two years old by now, I imagine. I don't even own a BluRay device. Well, I don't have one hooked up. I did buy a write capable drive to store data but that turned out to be slow and, frankly, I already had better media storage options.
I could be fairly unique in my use patterns. *shrugs* So, there's that. I'm not Linux exclusively. Sometimes I use BSD in a VM, after all. Err... I think I have a Minix VM that I've booted a few times. ;-)
For stuff like what I do? Meh... It works, I've not really noticed much of an improvement in overall speeds in years. The Intel, as mentioned, in my laptop is pretty fast. It's not an amount faster that makes me go, "wow." I don't think I've had a speed increase make me 'wow' in a long time. It's kind of sad.
Speaking as a 15-year Mac shareware publisher, most users dumb enough to install malware are too dumb to figure out how to disable Gatekeeper (on by default) to allow an unsigned (with Apple-issued certs) app to launch for the first time.
You have never met my niece. She calls me, on a fairly regular basis, to ask me to help her fix her Mac. I do not know why. Of all the times she's needed it repaired, I've only managed to solve the issue once. While I do, technically, own a modern Mac - I don't actually use it and I am pretty sure my daughter absconded with it when she last visited. So, I might not even technically own it any longer.
Anyhow, within a day of her first getting her Mac she had managed to install something called Mackeeper (I think?). It took some digging to find out that it was not some sort of malware protection but actually was the malware. How or why it got installed is a question I am not going to ask. It goes steadily downhill from there.
Damn you! That works in Linux! How much do I owe you for the password???