Posts by rcxb 929 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Aug 2018
I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to be able to buy an SD card, cheerfully start using it and then read and write to the same card with some other device. Uniformed? Quite right. This isn't the sort of thing someone should have to be informed about.
I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to buy a petrol car and fill it up with diesel and expect it to run just fine.
You should direct your ire at Microsoft, as they invented exFAT specifically to enable them to collect patent fees on the "new" format, while the Linux bunch just decline to pay them. And secondarily device manufacturers, who gleefully jump into Microsoft's trap (taking you with them), when they could easily use a common and standard format like UDF (as found on DVDs).
So it looks that to be *useful*, they really need to operate at some "magical frequency".
Wrong. The original comment was that they don't need to be on the ISM band. Your information just says they can't be half-way across the spectrum...
Moving from 2.5GHz to 2.6GHz gets you out of the unlicensed ISM band. You don't need to go from 10 cm (3GHz) to 3cm (10GHz) to do so.
He's going to get re-elected because the democrats are moving so far left of where centrists want to be. They have no viable candidate as a result
Nonsense...
Hillary is a extremely right-wing in all but social/gender politics. Important note: Trump beat Hillary. All the polls showed candidate Bernie Sanders (openly socialist) had far better numbers against Trump, but he couldn't win the primary against Hillary.
The early primaries are always where the extremists come out of the woodwork. Things normalize later on.
Trump won on populism. He said his tax cuts, eliminating regulations (coal) and aggressive negotiations with China would improve things for the poor and lower-middle class that weren't much of that as the economy gradually recovered. The fact that Trump actually made the economy far worse, and the tax breaks only went to billionaires and corporations who lined their pockets and didn't create any new jobs is irrelevant. He won adopting left-wing ideals, which isn't so far-fetched as he was a registered Democrat. Of course it was idiotic to buy the sales pitch, but people did. Somebody like Bernie can out-trump Trump on the popular bits of his campaign rhetoric, without all the insane, self-service, pathologically lying cheeto mannequin baggage.
Well isn't that the case for most security measures? All you're doing is protecting yourself and encouraging the criminals to move on to the next guy, who may not be so secure.
No. It's more a matter of increasing the cost of intrusions, so that the payoff isn't worth the added effort. If everybody hardened their systems, it wouldn't just raise the tide, it would reduce the risk for all, and seriously undercut organized crime.
It's just a question of letting somebody ELSE get in trouble first. Then THEY rget scammed, THEY report the domain to the authorities and it gets taken down. If everybody blocked domains for the first month, we'd all be right back in the same position, equally vulnerable.
You'll miss out on current events, as during political campaigns, major sporting events or the like, result in domains being spun-up quickly and getting flooded with traffic.
And saying it's suspicious because it's parked or doesn't have much content? That's entirely to be expected.
XFce hasn't fallen into the trap of "Let's pretend your desktop is a tablet".
Also, the UI has been consistent for a decade, and with just a little customization, it looks like good old Windows 95, but also integrates and works well with GNOME and KDE environments and programs.
It has a proper locked-down kiosk mode for shared systems and/or dangerous (to themselves) users.
The question should be: Why would anybody NOT want to use XFce?
There's nothing to defend, it's hyperbole. If you're going to say a good superpower should be completely non-controversial and maintain Ghandi-esque levels of conflict avoidance, I can only laugh at the delusional claim.
Lots of cases where the US goes to war or otherwise uses its economic power and alliances to pressure other nations into changing their behavior have been widely hailed by most of the world as beneficial for all. Many times it even does so at the behest of its allies (NATO, UN, etc) rather than for its own interests.
In other cases, it is less clear-cut and criticism is justified. Nobody has a perfect tract record.
If you're trying to claim China is better, you're gravely mistaken. The fact is that they only nominally behave because the US is superior in both economic might and military power, and they know there will be serious consequences if they are more overtly aggressive.
China will build its own industries until it no longer needs anything from the West
Moving everything in-house makes things more expensive due to reduced economies of scale and time and money needed up-front to develop such expertise. Increasing component prices will make it difficult to compete on the international (export) market, which will hurt their economy even more. Other countries without such trade restrictions, like Japan, Vietnam, or one of the other BRICS could pull ahead and take a chunk of their share of the world market.
They also are not involved in actively bombing countries, or waging economic war on governments that don't readily hand over their natural resources.
China would invade Taiwan in a week if the US merely announced it is no longer willing to start a nuclear war with China to defend it.
And you clearly don't know what's going on with the islands in the South China sea.
When Social Security becomes insolvent, benefits will see slight cuts. There have been calls to do so for some time, but it's politically unpalatable while the fund is still on the plus-side. Hitting the crisis point will move political opinion in the right direction, far enough to make sanity win the day.
And do you know what else (other than cuts) would save Social Security? Lots of new immigrants...
What's the problem with China building industries and being independent
To do so they have been imposing restrictions on imports and illegally subsidizing and dumping their products on international markets, which clearly violates WTO rules.
The US needs China, not the other way around.
Every expert will tell you the opposite. China losing a huge market for it's output will hurt them far more than the US.
just final death throes of a big ugly American monster, trying to pretend its still relevant.
The US is the biggest consumer market. Maybe China will surpass it some-day, but being a close number 2 will never make the US powerless and irrelevant. Not to mention that whole military thing...
I don't need ZFS on a desktop or laptop.
I do... Had a WD drive run fine for years, then it just started silently developing unreadable blocks and corrupting files. At least ZFS would have avoided that SILENTLY part, while RAID-Z would have prevented data loss.
Still, it's a shame BTRFS has taken so long to develop into a suitable option, and instead RHEL is determined to essentially back-port modern features into XFS (reflinks for batch/offline dedupe, and VDO for compression), and is similarly giving up and adoption ZFS as well.
Internet was born in a BSD world but GPL fueled its tremendous growth.
The GPL does not advance the growth of the internet. No standards or protocols that published only GPL'd implementations have ever become widespread. Meanwhile, those with freer licensed code often do. Only rsyncd has come close. Try to name any. Meanwhile in the BSD and MIT/X camp there is everything from DNS to HTTP, SSH to NFS, NTP to SSL. You can even look to multimedia formats like MP4, JPEG, etc.
The necessity of interoperability with proprietary software is a fact of life. It's delusional to pretend otherwise. And GPL'd software is effectively proprietary, too, as once you've integrated more-liberally licensed code, you can't contribute changes back upstream again (unless the whose code-base is dual-licensed).
While I agree and hate touch-screen, it's not as if the prior model was a panacea.
My previous car had a vent open/close button which DID NOTHING until you ALSO turned the FAN on, and had no indication of such.
Most cars have a hot-cold temperature dial which allows you to mix hot engine coolant with your cold air conditioner output, with little or no visible indication in the non-extreme cases.
Both are issues an electronic control system would be smart enough to prevent. And while you can have mechanical inputs to an electronic system, there's rarely any way for them to provide feedback when the computer overrides them (i.e. motorized dials), which is a problem in itself. Electronic push-buttons with LED indicators are a reasonable compromise, but I have yet to see a vehicle where that is used for ALL the controls.
End of the 1990s, my recollection is that while advanced power management (like suspend and hibernate) were often dodgy, regular shutdown/halt/reboot were not a problem. Is this yet another classic Windows-ism?
NT4 was released back in 96, then patched for years and years after. It did NOT include the standard APM power-off in the base or any of the update. Windows 95 was just a hare ahead of it in that respect. There were 3rd party patches to give NT4 APM power-off capabilities, but that wasn't a common addition.
You don't have to go back that far, either. I had a PC in the mid '00s that Linux decided couldn't be APM powered-off. A very minor nuisance... until the right confluence of other human errors conspires with.
The rack ears remain uncovered by the bezel, so label them there.
If you aren't in a dense, shared-hosting environment, you really don't need the bezels at all.
Those massive swiss-cheese bezel are a thing of the ancient past. They seriously restricted airflow and were named and shamed by Google as to why they build their own servers.
Dell has been nice enough to provide an LCD on their servers for a couple decades now, which you can use to show the hostname, or any custom string.
Still, with the XD servers, there is NO SPACE on the front of the server that isn't a hard drive sled, so you're back to labels on the ears. They even had to put the VGA and USB ports on the ears, they have zero other space to work with.
He's not entirely wrong, because Sprint has awful LTE coverage, and it's only their CDMA network that gives them anything like a decent footprint.
You, however, are COMPLETELY wrong in saying TMo doesn't compete with Sprint. They are fierce competitors, always responding to the others' pricing and promotions, and even more so in the wholesale/mvno markets.
Your rosy pronouncements for the merger only make sense if Sprint customers all stay with TMo. It's quite likely a significant number of them will flee to ATT, or Verizon. Nothing in the merger will give TMo a footprint comparable to those two, and it will still take years of expansion to become comparable, 3rd place competitor.
TMo just wants the customers, Sprint's network is mostly incompatible and almost entirely overlaps with their own. They should have divested the entire Sprint network, with just a few years of free use as they force customers to change their handsets to TMo compatible ones. Of course that would have been an instant competitor in the cellular space, whereas this way they can hope Dish doesn't follow-through and ever become competitive (which is most likely).
If Intel, with their deep pockets and experience making cellular mobens, [sic] had trouble with 5G chips then what chance does Apple have?
Apple has deeper pockets, a deep-seated interest in preventing a monopoly in this space, and a guaranteed market for their output. When Intel was the supplier, Qualcomm just had to undercut them on price to win over Intel's customers. That's quite a bit harder for Qualcomm to do now that the supplier and the customer are one and the same.
> car batteries are designed for starting service, and running one down will usually kill it forever
The sealed, VRLA batteries in (practically all) UPSes are very similar to car batteries (they are NOT built like "Marine" or deep- cycle batteries). It's a simple matter of having the electronics treat 10.5V as zero, and drop the load at that point, instead of continuing to discharge and permanently damaging the battery.
Data centres don't need the cryogenic temperatures they once did. 30C/85F is a common operating temperature for server these days.
And evaporative cooling of data centres is quite common now. In locations with consistently low humidity, you can avoid the energy and expense of compression cycle cooling and use just a fraction as much power during the hottest parts of the hottest days... the rest of the time (at night, in autumn, winter etc) they can easily use outside air without adding water.
Facebook's data centre tour is a good explanation of the technologies going into data centres these days:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZUX3n2yAzY
> No one wants their OS held hostage by IBM.
The whole sales pitch for RedHat/Linux is that they can't possibly hold your OS hostage. Compile the source for whatever software package into an RPM yourself, and go... I do it all the time when I need some software customized a bit differently, or (more often) newer than the ancient version found in RHEL. You can even transition over to another vendor that's compatible with RHEL, like Oracle, if you (are crazy and) would prefer. SuSE is a bit different, but not a big leap from RHEL.
> These had 40% of the US smartphone market at one point
Only because the market was so tiny that they had almost no competition. Windows on a PDA form factor is HORRIBLE, absolutely ghastly and miserable all around. Just because it's familiar doesn't make it any good. The fact that iPhone (with a decent UI) instantly killed it is proof enough of that. The new Windows Phone OS was Microsoft trying to copy the iPhone/Android UI.
> Tons of water in the desert.
Just because it doesn't fall from the sky very often, doesn't mean there isn't a lot of it. Lake Mead / Hoover Dam is right on the boarder of Nevada / California. Antarctica is a desert, too...
> import it from California - coastal state, they'll have loads of water right?
California does have lots of water, and more every year as they keep building reservoirs. Problem is they have a huge and growing population, and a huge farming industry, so per-capita there's a real crunch on the supplies. There's a much more serious water supply problem looming in the mid-west US, where the Ogalala aquifer is being drained quickly, and not replenished.
> You might think that building data centres in the desert is unreasonable – the cooling costs would be too high
The consistently low humidity actually makes cooling a huge volume of air to comfortable room temperature (~20C) very easy, if you've got an ample source of water to evaporate. It gets difficult and expensive if you need a temperature any lower than that.
> They just don't like that a sole winner was chosen, since
...since they knew it wouldn't be them, shutting them out of the money entirely. If they thought they might end up with the whole pie, it would have been perfectly fine with them to have a single winner-take-all contract.
> I really appreciate how I can still run any old and new 32-bit Windows apps
Except for the laundry list of the many that you can't run... We've got various old Windows systems scattered all over this place because one or more critical applications doesn't work on even slightly newer versions of Windows. So the Win 98, 2000, XP, etc., systems keep chugging along, sometimes virtualized, sometimes on scavenged old retired hardware from other systems of the era. We wouldn't do it if we didn't have to. WINE on Linux does a better job running legacy Windows apps than newer releases of Windows.
> Batteries are an energy store. If they go wrong, they are a bomb like any other large energy store.
It doesn't matter how much total energy they have stored, it matters how QUICKLY they can put out a large amount of that energy. A block of wood has more energy than your fireworks example, but one goes boom while the other slowly radiates heat. Shorting-out a low-energy-density super-capacitor is much more exciting than shorting out a high-energy battery...
Except with batteries, it's almost always the reactivity of the chemicals that gets you. Lead-acid batteries are actually a very tolerant of extreme abuse, EXCEPT for the fact that they generate hydrogen and oxygen, which is explosive. Similarly, Li-Ion polymer batteries would only get hot when shorted out, except for the fact than their ingredients combust into an impressive fireball once ejected from the casing by a fault condition.
Ni-MH batteries have about 2/3rd the energy density of Li-Ion polymer batteries by volume, but they're incredibly stable and in fault conditions just get hot and simply don't cause the conflagrations Li-Ion polymer batteries do. LiFePO4 chemistry Li-Ion batteries are similarly quite a bit more stable than Li-Po.
> Adding support for web extensions doesn't require you to remove existing ones.
They added it TWO YEARS before they deprecated the legacy extensions. How long do you think they should wait? It always hurts to rip off a bandage, but you can't put it off forever.
The article explains new version of the browser would both break legacy extensions, and possibly be broken by legacy extensions, and the performance issues.
> international companies no longer trust you.
International companies never trusted China, but they still crawled on their hands and knees to get access to that huge consumer market. The US has the biggest market, and cutting off your profits to spite your face just isn't a likely outcome.
More likely is future trade deals with the US (and China) including a nuclear option... If one party imposes tariffs, even for "national security reasons," the other party gets a huge cash sum, or similar.
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