Posts by JLV

Re: at $5000

A slightly cheaper approach is to buy a high end gaming laptop.

ASUS has ones that go up to 32GB for example. Count 2-2.5K $. Bought mine specifically to run multiple VMs in. They may not have all the exotica of high end business laptops, but they cost less. And they are infinitely more powerful, with better screens, than normal business or consumer laptops. The graphics oomph is a bit wasted on dev work, but that's OK.

One problem is that you have to replace consumer Windows with Windows Pro. Or put Linux on it.

I would not have made that statement regarding an individual person, but Mr. Fry is a celebrity. As such, you will sometimes get badgered and quite unpleasantly so. That's just the way life is. Some celebrities will struggle with mental illness. Does that mean no one can criticize them, outside of making fun of their mental state?

Regardless of whether Orlowski was "right" or "wrong" in posting this, and previous, articles, it would seem that publicly ignoring it and not responding by calling him "frankly evil" would have been a better idea. That's generally a better coping and avoidance strategy than feeding creatures that live under bridges, especially when you are a public persona.

From the sounds of it, Mr. Fry's main mistake is not to employ a fact checker when doing science coverage. That could be easily remedied. In fact, I think his producers are remiss there. To the public and to Fry. These are not one man shows on a shoestring at the local county fair.

As many have said on this thread, they appreciate his interest in promoting science and he recognizes his own limitations. If he brings the enthusiasm and PR savvy, why not have someone doublecheck before releasing? Everyone comes out ahead.

This feud of theirs seems more silly as we go, but I still find the claim that Orlowski intentionally, or directly, made fun of his illness a stretch.

Re: Nietzche

Sure about your math? we're at 7 billion, but population was at 1 billion already in 1800, 200 years ago. That's 3 generations and for it to work it implies really really fast growth within generations.

https://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpop/table_history.php

But thanks for propagating memes. Given the context, wonder if Minsky would have found its propagation funny.

>blood type B hackers

Don't misunderstand me.

Health info is about as private as could possibly be, and rightfully so. Blood type access is not at issue and should be as easily accessible as possible. But what about things like STDs, mental disorders and long term illnesses? Disclosure of any of those could result in personal problems and work discrimination (especially in countries where the employer is on the hook for health care).

I just find it odd that confidentiality is so often invoked to explain away health IT failures and then to see this article's findings.

Re: Someone made money w/o giving Lord Larry his dues!

Intolerable!

Me seem to recall Red Hat, having to change their patching procedures a while back because another software company (naming no one, mind you) would just mooch off their patches to maintain their own, "Unbreakable", distribution.

Now, the legality thereof in GPL land is probably on the moochers' side, but when that same company cries grievances to high heaven on usage of a supposedly open sourced language, I find that ironic ;-)

>security updates for 5 years

Worth considering seriously.

But what about name & shame? Force manufacturers to officially file, for each model, when manufacture has ended as well as the date of their last security update. Then publish the data for all the manufacturers together, allowing easy comparison, and let the public decide. Consumer Reports would have a field day with this.

Methink Samsung might not be so thrilled with their dirty undies being aired out in that case. And how about the unlucky Winphone 7 customers?

Kudos to the Dutch for kicking them in the gonads.

@ Kristian Walsh Re: There was always a near monopoly on encyclopedic knowledge

Ok, but if your chosen metric is error rate per article, then you also need to consider length of said articles.

Not equating quantity with quality per se, but you would be more likely to encounter errors in a 2-3 page article about a subject than a 2-3 paragraph entry about the same. Unless you are padding, you are just communicating more info, some of which risks being incorrect.

On the other hand, if all you are providing is a rather short entry (which is the way I remember seeing most encyclopedia coverage), then you will generally have to stick to shorter, more generally verifiable information and you would be more likely to not get it wrong.

Taking as an example, your typical historical battle entry*. Wikipedia typically provides date, location, commanding officers, number of participating troops, number of casualties, etc. Then it goes onto into details about what happened, often on at least a page or so in the case of significant battles.

I doubt most Britannica entries would have addressed much more than the date, location and participating armies and generals. Along with a likely much shorter description of the events. Much less to get wrong.

Not defending Wikipedia overmuch, but that 30% overshoot benefits from being put into context as well. I recall seeing other studies stating that Wikipedia and Brittanica were about as (un)reliable each. They're both a quick way to get some hopefully not too inaccurate information about a subject, not fully reliable or authoritative sources.

*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cannae

http://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Cannae (which would probably be shorter in dead tree format)

Re: Actually there will be ZERO cost for Apple to pass on

Problem is the US has unusually high corp taxes but ample loopholes to avoid paying them. Lower, fully collected, non-avoidable rates would serve everyone better, except tax lawyers and accountants. And where would the world be without those 2 fine professions, I ask you? Not to mention putting all the (justifiably) outraged social justice crusaders outta work as well.

Article missing crucial bit: 8B is Europe-wide tax liability or Ireland-only? Seeing as many game Ireland tax residency.

moped

In Neal Stephenson's "In the beginning was the command line" (http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html) essay, circa 2000:

Linux is an M1 tank coming in a free DYI kit. Bit hard to drive, but powerful.

Mac OS - the horrendously crappy 8.x or 9.x series, and any Apple user who doesn't think it was pants by 1999 is truly deserving of being called a fanboi - was a Vespa. Cool looking but crap.

Windows is a station wagon, IIRC. (Insert joke about Lada making station wagons?)

Unlike Neal's latter literary efforts, he more or less manages to get the point across without rambling on about the impact that the mating habits of arctic reindeers had on the dissemination of the printing press in Outer Mongolia or whatsuch.

Re: the internet isn't the problem

Actually, that is a good question. What about reverting to the immediately preceding release instead? A lot of the Chef-based devops deployment cookbooks I have been looking at are based on delivering a codeline (for the actual application code, not the ancillary services) that gets stored in a directory, along with preceding codelines using a hash/incremental naming scheme. To activate that codeline, you just point "current" to it via symlink and the rest of VM only refers to "current" to run the application.

Many actual cloud-y VM implementations don't so much do that as drop the VM and rebuild a new one with the new codeline, even though this mechanism is in place. Easier. In IoT land, however, you can't just nuke the device. But, at the cost of doubling storage requirements, you could implement a fallback-to-previous scheme.

And, I would submit that the internet (culture) IS the problem here. Nest had a presumably stable product until they iterated it once too many times and got to a failed state. But a physical thermostat is not a cloud VM you can easily drop and replace. It requires a different state of mind in terms of management (avoiding bricking), security and user control. Ultimately it means acknowledging that its continued good operation is somewhat more important to the user than a cloud FarmVille or Twitter clone having six sigma uptime.

On the positive side, at least we are seeing a culture that should encourage fixing bugs in embedded software.

>Real programmers, (like me),

There's OO and OO.

The original Design Patterns book was the first book I read where the intent, and advantages of, proper object design came through. It requires a fair bit of attention to get it, but it sure doesn't talk down to you and it sounds very little like your critique.

Most OO books do not so much sin the way you claim, they sin by immediately focusing on inheritance, because... well, it is easy to explain. Never mind that inheritance is only one facet, and often the least useful, of OO. There's also often a tradeoff: some things like dynamically composing objects together at runtime are extremely powerful and hard to do procedurally, but also make debugging exponentially harder.

And most intro to Java books also sin by assuming that, since you don't know the One True Language (TM), then you don't know objects either so they must launch in an OO intro.

On the other hand, as an example of less than useful gratuitous object orientation, read this little nugget.

http://csis.pace.edu/~bergin/patterns/ppoop.html

Start out with a simple hack (on top) and go down to the author's brilliant suggestion at end. All other things remaining equal, which bit of code would you be rather looking at 2 AM with an angry customer on the line?

Notice the .edu in the above url, maybe that's where all those pants uni programmers come from ;-)

>Biodiesel is significantly cleaner than Petrol. Straight vegetable oil is just as good

Recycling cooking oil is fine as a way to power some vehicles, but please do the math.

I refill my (petrol/gas) car about every 4 weeks, with a 40 liter top up on average. Do you really really think that the average persons eats anywhere near the amount of chips per month to generate 40 liters of gas-equivalent recycled biodiesel? Even the Spanish, who advocate a rather heroic use of olive oil, would find it hard to have that much cooking oil around. Your idea just doesn't scale up to most vehicles.

As far as taking vegetable oil straight from production (once you ran out of cooking oil to recycle), you still have to grow the stuff. Which takes ample land, fertilizers and energy. If the process is anything like our glorious ethanol endeavors the main thing that would achieve is more $ to the lucky farmers and higher food prices, rather than any CO2 reduction.

Global warming may be an issue, but, by themselves, good intentions and wishful thinking around romantic ideas aren't a solution. You need to get something that makes sense economically (even assuming increased carbon taxes) and that can be scaled up.

Re: Ammunition

With all respect for the various viewpoints that go into gun politics and also with respect to the founding fathers and the Constitution, but I find it disturbing that such a high proportion of NRA advocates use "resistance to the lawfully elected government" as a justification for gun ownership. That's a whole different ballpark than "shoot a burglar endangering my family", IMHO.

I mean, many people in Western countries seem dissatisfied with our governments and our politicians. That doesn't mean many people, in countries other than the US, distrust them to the point where we think it necessary to hold weapons for potential armed resistance. That's what elections are for, and the US Constitution has ample, perhaps even excessive, checks and balances built into it to prevent excessive power concentration by any of the 3 branches.

Do some of you distrust your government that much? Your own soldiers? You know, the guys that did the dying on your behalf in the last decade or so. But yet the Republican right generally tends to view catchall anti-terrorist and surveillance laws in a benign fashion and excoriated Snowden?

'sides, as you point out, the balance of power is way on the Federal side anyway. Not to mention that, in any contest between a group of individuals and a competent military, the military's training and unit-level tactics should easily overcome individual skill, even at weapon parity level.

Re: iPad 2 and iPhone 4S work perfectly with iOS 9.x

>anyone telling otherwise is lying.

Two other people have already made that point*. More politely.

Insulting people without knowing the whole story does remarkably little to convince others that your analysis of a product is based on sound judgment, rather than your prejudices, be they positive or negative. I suspect that at least some Apple users cringe at comments like these, just like savvy Linux users do not particularly want to be associated with folks like our dear departed Eadon. Since you are calling me a liar, I will happily call you an a.+hole.

* dunno, maybe a factory reset and reinstall would help. Something's certainly different on my tablet and it's not from running many apps either. Thanks (to the other posters) for this info.

given the subject, this brings to mind a short story by PKD (can't recall the title) where a robot investigates a murder scene and gradually narrows down the possible culprits by trawling a database of characteristics for the population vs evidence it finds at the scene. I believe that it turns out that the whole evidence set was being gamed from the start.

Re: The game is up Microsoft - your code is crap!

Don't be daft. Apple, with several failed attempts at rolling a successor to OS 9, really didn't have much of a choice but a desperate gamble on BSD. Which, incidentally, has no GPL "show your source code" requirements. Neither condition applies to your little fantasy.

No disrespect to Linux intended. It has shown its value many times over. Linux on Azure? That makes sense, for those who want Azure. More interop? Great!

Windows on Linux? Via Wine 8-/ ? Why?

'sides, monoculture are rarely a good thing. Linux and users benefits from the competition.