What do the 9% remainder do? Watch? Bloody pervs!

"News for nerds." I'm a nerd, I flashed my OCZ SSD. I've had it for 2 years and according to S.M.A.R.T. and my own human perception it's working like a charm. I had it for a good price, and it's got great performance. I'm a rather happy customer. Would I have preferred not to flash the firmware? Yes. Do I care, or is it beyond my skills? No.

Disclaimer: I'm French.

At school I was taught how the French Revolution was an amazing thing. It freed us. It was the end of a time of the absolute, divine right monarchy that France and other European nations had for almost a thousand years. I learned later about The Terror, where nobles would get their heads chopped off. Including the wives and kids, and I reckon some servants too. There's probably been a rape or two, as well, since that's what you get when a mob forms up and there's nobody to police them. They don't teach you much of that when you're at school. I guess it's understandable, since you don't want 12 years old to learn about rape and kids their age being killed just because they were born in the right family. Or do you?

Anyway, I learned much, much later, in my late 20's, that the actual History is much more cynic. It was not "we, the people" (to paraphrase an American concept) who started this. People got riled up by the bourgeois. A bourgeois is a very, very rich commoner. He can hardly hope to ever become a noble. That limits, right there, the richness he can ever hope to achieve. He'll always be looked down from the nobles. He can be killed for talking wrong to a noble. It's better to be a poor noble than a rich bourgeois. So, they didn't like that very much. They started the Revolution. They manipulated the peasants and poorly educated population to do the Revolution. Just so they could usurp the power from the nobles.

Note that I'm personally fine with the fact that we took the nobles out. Nobody should have a birthright over somebody else, just because. This is unfair, this is archaic, and it doesn't make the society move forward. The problem I have with the Revolution, besides the way it's taught (unless you do a History Major you won't hear much of this), is that it replaced one nobility with another. At least the previous one, the actual nobles, where honest about their absolute power. They said "I'm better than you, you're lesser than me, fuck you and fuck off." But the Bourgeoisie, which is still in power today (we call them Oligarchs, because they are the ultimate Bourgeois and there are not so many of them), is much more hypocritical. They will make you think you're in a Democracy, when really you're not. When the Banks can decide whether or not a state will default its credits, after pushing them towards into a mass debt, it's not a democracy. It's an illusion.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, as I just started typing with no set plans for the post. I guess my point is, I'm fed up of hearing we are in a democracy, and we should feel lucky, because more and more I feel I have no choice and no say. Even if my situation isn't as bad as a serf from 400 years ago, it sure as hell isn't as good as the people back them wanted my life to be.

Disclaimer: I'm a network engineer in performance testing.

It certainly isn't cheaper to run a router on a PC than on appliance. A stock Linux has pretty bad performances, and the hardware is not as tuned as an appliance. Mostly, they take up more space, use more Watt per Gbps, and don't provide as much performance. There's a reason why these pieces of software are highly tuned, and performance usually is the main goal right after features.

The evolution of the market however is towards virtualisation. They call it NfV - Network functions Virtualization. They (the Network Equipment Manufacturers) provide virtual versions of their appliance, but not the binaries themselves because their (usually Linux) OS is so tuned, it can't be used on a generic platform if you want any kind of performance. Now this brings a lot of problems, such as, again, performance - a lot of these guys have FPGA/ASICs that do a lot of hardware acceleration (IP or TCP layers offloading, like calculating the CRCs in the headers), and removing that is a problem. Maybe paravirtualization will help but they're not there yet. The second problem is the overhead of the hypervisors. Whatever VMWare and others will tell you, it's more than 3%, and even if it's 3%, the scale of the data centers make these 3% turn into millions of dollars each year.

I'm a network engineer, and I do some web development as a hobby to understand better the application layers and all that payload I transport on the wires.. I hate Javascript because I find it hard to debug in a browser. I like having a proper IDE to help me debug my code. If then they convert that code to JS and it works the same, it works for me. I'm not a professional developer so maybe the ones who are should write in JS directly, but my experience is that JS is not a great language because of the debugging. I prefer C# and Java because of Visual Studio and Eclipse's help in debugging.

No it's not. If you work for the NSA, or within its ecosystem, and hand out your password to *anyone* all you are is a really bad testimony to the training the agency give so its employees. When the IT in my company asks me for my password I always cringe and want to tell them "just set a new one, you're a freaking admin on the AD." If I was working in Intelligence I'd probably become very highly suspicious if a colleague was asking for my credentials and you probably tell on him.

Richard Stallman should be all over this. I mean, he keeps saying all over the place how software needs to be open for people to review what it does, and if there's ever been a time where this was needed, it's now.

Yeah, no. Paul Verhoeven has made too many films in a dystopian future to take Starship Troopers at face value.

Too bad for you, because C# is an awesome language that absolutely doesn't require Windows or .NET or Mono.

When you first boot up the OS, you have to setup a Google account or no account at all.

Let me log with something else than a Google account on my Android. Why shouldn't I be able to log with a Microsoft Live, Apple iCloud, or any OpenID/OAuth provider I so choose? Thanks for the OS, but I'd like it to come with no strings attached.

... an insurance company would accept to lower their rate by 80%?

I come from Europe. I go to the US on a regular basis. You guys are crazy when it comes to A/C. I'm usually cold inside a cooled building, I have to put on a sweater or something. I've talked about this with many colleagues and they agree the A/C is set just too low in the US. Make it a reasonable temperature and you'll have tons of savings right there.

What about private companies who go easy on safety to turn a quick buck? See Fukushima where years before the incident reports were written indicating that the facility wouldn't survive a tsunami. Or when Areva drops nuclear waste in the rivers of France? The problem isn't with nuclear power per se, it's what our brilliant capitalistic society makes of it. We, as a civilization, are too bent on the short-time, low-hanging fruit of easy money to be trusted with anything as dangerous as nuclear fission reactors. When money isn't the only real God we worship, maybe we could consider it. How about storage of the nuclear waste? That's not going anywhere and is a huge problem by itself, and you should consider it in your carbon footprint calculation.

This is already the case in Israel. You have security check points before reaching the terminal (while still in your car). Then before entering the terminal you can be randomly checked (I was, once, because I wore a light jacket in the middle of summer and that was suspicious). Then you get an extra security check (with luggage x-ray) before reaching the check-in counters. Then you get the "usual" security check where you stuff is x-ray'd and you go through a metal detector. Then you get the passport check. As an international traveler this is annoying to me, but at least the Israelis are quite efficient and all this goes rather quick. I hope the same doesn't happen in the US because from what I've seen, Americans are not as efficient.