You just sound like a computer "hipster" to me. Come crack open a PBR with me and relax .. you don't have to try this hard to be different. As someone who has done production in many industries, please let me reassure you that we wouldn't have adopted today's tools if they weren't better than yesterdays.

5, insightful? Everything is better today? Like web2.0ified everything? Hardware management like Cisco's UCS client is now web2.0. As is VMWare's preferred interface to vsphere5. And half the monitoring crap I use. This is all in a fairly modern server farm.

And yet, the web2.0 part of all of it works exactly like, and is just as useful as a piece of dinosaur turd rotting in a vat of lava.

So, almost by definition, you're trying to run Cisco's interface over a narrow bandwidth relatively high latency IPVPN link to a remote datacentre, through a VNC session. And yet when it wants to pop up a web2.0 modal confirmation (yes/no) dialog box, it makes the background *fuzzy*. That works *extremely* well. Nothing like having to wait for 30 seconds everytime I want to click "confirm" while it progressively makes the background more and more blurry. But that's hip, I guess.

And when I try to move a bunch of servers into a different category in the Zenoss monitoring software, there's a small chance, that happens enough often to keep me on my toes nevertheless, that the GUI display of what I have shift-selected will be out of sync with what the backend thinks was the 4th to 8th item in the list (because some AJAX crap didn't quite load entirely, but the browser didn't flag any error), and I'll be moving a bunch of unidentified machines into the "decommissioned" category. That's awesome when that happens. Because it's web2.0, there's no change management, undo or auditing. If I notice that a bunch of machines seem to be in the wrong category, and can't work out where they came from, I have no choice but to go back to backups and try to restore several databases. That's just awesome. Give me back nagios and *automatically* managed .cfg files that can be checked into git (see, I can adapt to change, when change is an *improvement* over the old), please.

I mean, the trend is to remove choice and features and pretend that configuration makes it too hard for the poor lusers (ala, gnome3).

One bug with chromium that has been marked as WontFix for this very reason, is issue 11612. "You can install an extension (that doesn't work in most situations you need it to, such as in the default about:blank)!". As bad as firefox has been getting since version 2, at least *that* particular feature still can be turned on.

But I do have to ask, WhyTF would anyone want an inbuilt PDF viewer? That's the first thing I disable in browsers that do that by default (except in very old editions of SuSE, where it was installed into the system and not able to be disabled because SuSE, at least then, liked to load everything unconditionally and not overridable by the user). Yes, you can have a poor replacement for a PDF viewer that isn't a first class PDF viewer and can't print and is slow, and half the key bindings just plain don't work, or you can have it in a dedicated PDF viewer that does One Thing Well, just like Unix intended.

All redesign work should go through the UI/UX folks responding to the users' needs.

I strongly believe that form follows function, but without real consideration to how users will be using the software the user interface can seriously impede the actual function. Some engineers can be downright sadistic in their UI designs.

UX folk are why we end up with Microsoft Windows 8, the Ribbon interface, lack of menu bars, Gnome 3 and Chromium ("no, you can't have middle-click-selection-opens-URL-contained-in-copy-buffer, because that's too confusing for the lusers!"). They should all be dumped into a vat of boiling Hydrofluoric acid.

OK, so he doesn't like good sound quality, so he got rid of the decent speakers and replaced it with Apple rubbish (that sound good to bad ears because they've just turned up the loudness and done wacky artificial things to phasing of the stereo signal). And same with cameras (personally, I think people who publish photos taken with an iphone should be shot for polluting the flow of electrons with their crappy photos). Where did his microwave go? Does he entirely eat out now? Concrete floor? Sounds lovely.

Heck, I still go on multiday tours on motorbike (with not much spare room besides my tent and sleeping bag) with SLR and second lense *because it produces better photos*. It's a pity a lot of people don't care about quality anymore, but some of us still do.

(To those who will bleat "Vote!": I do vote but the only choices likely to be elected are those thoroughly venal politicians who will continue the irresponsible spending. It is built into the election process that those who are committed to significantly and actually cutting the government spending will never get the big donations necessary to win. The big donors give the big bucks to politicians who will turn the federal faucet in their direction -- not turn it off. )

Use those guns that you guys are so proud of to usher in the revolution, and thereby pass a referendum to change your broken voting system to anything but first-pass-the-post. Preferably (so to speak) something preferential. Then you too can have a half decent system where you can vote for one of the other corrupt parties without "wasting" your vote.

Here's how a typical SMS platform might work: someone purchasing a box of malaria medicine could send the barcode information to a text number, which would send back an SMS message identifying the drug as real or counterfeit.

Ah, it looks like they're hoping to implement RFC3514, the evil bit. If the barcode includes the evil bit, then it must be counterfeit.

A country that uses torture as an interrogation technique should not consider itself civilized.

Never drop context, which in this case is the 3000+ deaths of September 11, 2001.

Um. Stop drinking the koolaid. Manning's release of the helicopter footage that precipitated all of this, shows what was happening in Iraq. Iraq has absolutely nothing to do with the WTO attacks of 2001. The deployment to Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with the attack other than it being a convenient smokescreen to a gullible American public who bought the Weapons of Mass Distraction argument. Like most American wars of modern times, this was entirely to do with gaining control of oil fields.

Most fonts appear to have smoother edges and more consistent curves when rendered as black-text-on-white background, which is why that is the default ...

Er, what?

The web colour scheme was around since well before anti-aliasing was common. And has been annoying all that time. If it was easier to read, why would most sysadmins have green-on-black coloured xterms?

I did once compile xdark, and you can invoke "xdark 1 0" to reverse video the entire screen, but I never got into the habit of using it regularly. I just try to minimise my time on the web instead (haha, yeah nah).

You might want to put a keybinding into your window manager to toggle invocations of "xdark 1 0" and "xdark 0 1" for those moments when you need accurate colour representation.

Heck, some of my laptop screens have been too bright on their darkest setting. Then you run "xdark 0 0.4" to give you a bit of relief.

Well, 10 years ago to the week, Mount Stromlo Observatory burnt down. The owners of that also own Siding Spring, and put in place many measures. Like clearing trees, and installing fire mesh on all the windows.

Problem is, the flash point of eucalyptus oil is 47 degrees, so on hot days the country is basically guaranteed to erupt in a massive fireball. Fireballs have been observed rolling along bare earth for a km, just igniting the volatile oils above the ground layer in the air.

Other problem is that we've had record rains for 2/3 years so burnoffs couldn't really be done. And now we're back in a record hot spell, and everything has completely dried out in the past 6 months now that La Nina is back. It went from too wet to burn off to too volatile to burn off in a blink of the eye (and since there are government organisations involved, it could be argued they can't act that quickly :) .

Most buildings on the mountaintop are 1970's era. The main 3.9m dome has no active fire safety equipment in it, but it is clad in fire proof material and was always intended as the fire safety refuge for the entire mountaintop, since there's only a single winding road off the mountaintop (which always scared the hell out of me in Summer).

The lodge on the other hand had wooden doors, was quite up close to the bush (a feature, because it moderated the temperatures for the astronomers sleeping during the daytime), and was sorely lacking in maintenance (although when I worked there, I could hear workman on the roof often enough, so I presume they were clearing leaves and twigs from the roof).

Fortunately, yesterday was Sunday. The photos the guy on duty took just before leaving look awfully scary to me, but he's a firey, and knows what he's doing. Might have been interesting to get all 18 staff and x number of visiting astronomers off the mountain in a hurry if it was a week working day the bus was back in town and not available when the evac was called. Not much room to land a chopper (although it's been done before).

By the way, it was 40 degrees on the mountaintop yesterday according to the onsite met tower (prior to reading 104degC for a couple of minutes as the fire passed over). When I worked there, I found that if it was hot on the mountaintop, it was unbearable in town. The constant temperature inversion meant that it was always 10 or so degrees hotter in town. Yesterday was a frickin dangerous day. I haven't looked, but I suspect we made a lot of use of the new category of fire danger that was introduced after the Victorian Black Friday fires a few years ago - "Catastrophic (Code Red)". That's the new category they now use to say "get the fuck out, don't even try to defend your purpose built property. You will die.".

As to your question about burnoffs; of course burnoffs are regularly done onsite. There's a dedicated fire truck on site, large tanks of water, fire pumps, a trained staff fire team, assistance from the local RFS. Every few years they burn off different sections of the mountain and the surrounding national park. Using a coordinated, evidence based approach (ie, not the method you would use if you typically read The Daily Smellograph and other Is Your News Limited? publications).

Do they never do controlled burns to reduce the burden of undergrowth? Seems like they keep having large bush fires threaten important stuff.

One wonders if this is Environmentalism run amuck of putting out all fires until instead of number of small natural fires that don't do significant damage, the fuel builds up into inferno range that does great damage?

Or you could just clear the brush around your observatory regularly -- again if the Environmentalists let you. Australia is rather weird in this regard.

Well, 10 years ago to the week, Mount Stromlo Observatory burnt down. The owners of that also own Siding Spring, and put in place many measures. Like clearing trees, and installing fire mesh on all the windows.

Problem is, the flash point of eucalyptus oil is 47 degrees, so on hot days the country is basically guaranteed to erupt in a massive fireball. Fireballs have been observed rolling along bare earth for a km, just igniting the volatile oils above the ground layer in the air.

Other problem is that we've had record rains for 2/3 years so burnoffs couldn't really be done. And now we're back in a record hot spell, and everything has completely dried out in the past 6 months now that La Nina is back. It went from too wet to burn off to too volatile to burn off in a blink of the eye (and since there are government organisations involved, it could be argued they can't act that quickly :) .

Most buildings on the mountaintop are 1970's era. The main 3.9m dome has no active fire safety equipment in it, but it is clad in fire proof material and was always intended as the fire safety refuge for the entire mountaintop, since there's only a single winding road off the mountaintop (which always scared the hell out of me in Summer).

The lodge on the other hand had wooden doors, was quite up close to the bush (a feature, because it moderated the temperatures for the astronomers sleeping during the daytime), and was sorely lacking in maintenance (although when I worked there, I could hear workman on the roof often enough, so I presume they were clearing leaves and twigs from the roof).

Fortunately, yesterday was Sunday. The photos the guy on duty took just before leaving look awfully scary to me, but he's a firey, and knows what he's doing. Might have been interesting to get all 18 staff and x number of visiting astronomers off the mountain in a hurry if it was a week working day the bus was back in town and not available when the evac was called. Not much room to land a chopper (although it's been done before).

I sure wish cities would hire guys like you to work on their traffic lights.

Yep, the hick that designed your traffic light sequencing system obviously didn't have years of training required to work with a highly complex distributed system:
http://xkcd.com/277/

It certainly could be true that the excess carbon dioxide is not having the predicted warming effect. For example, the warming should cause the humidity to increase, and we have observed this increase in humidity. The increased moisture in the atmosphere might create more clouds, which could possibly reflect more sunlight into space, causing a negative feedback to limit the warming.

Negative feedback either places limits on an external forcing mechanism serving to reduce the deviation from a natural state (but not eliminating it), or if the negative feedback is large enough, causes a cyclic response. Do you want your atmosphere to enter into a huge cyclic response varying between several natural equilibria? At best you can hope that a handwavy undocumented negative feedback force (most climate feedbacks I am aware are strongly positive. Eg, melting icecaps and trapped permafrost methane) makes a bad problem slightly less worse.

It's very possible. If you read the RFPs for some government things, you'll find things that almost no vendor can possibly adhere to. If you are a top tier vendor like Cisco, you likely CAN meet the requirements, but not cheaply. So instead of trying to compete on price, you compete on being able to fulfill all of the requirements in the RFP. You take the gamble that the people analyzing the proposals will nix the cheaper ones as non-compliant, and you are the only bidder left.

And the people analysing the RFPs aren't *allowed* to use their judgement. We might well know that actual requirements, and we might well know why the RFP was written up the way it was (so we could end up with exactly the same obsolete equipment from an incompetent venduh as last time), but if the best value proposal is lacking 2 of the 4 unnecessary HDs per blade, then it loses 2 points and we have to go the expensive bid with poorer RAM-to-CPU ratio instead. And they're now busy gouging us for port licences because the RFP didn't cover things like that.

It's all about Cover Your Arse and doing things by the book than doing things with due diligence.

Moreover, their CIO dropped in on the conference call and said not only are they not gonna renew the contract but he was gonna have us blacklisted with other financial companies that we were looking to grow business with.

I'd blacklist you for using the non-word "gonna".

It's a dangerous trend that will threaten the budding Internet-based video business â" whether from Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Windows Store, or Google Play â" then jeopardize Internet services of all sorts. It's a complex issue, and though the villains are obvious â" the telecom carriers and cable providers â" the solutions are not. The result will be a metered Internet that discourages use of the services so valuable for work and play.'"

Where do people come up with this crap? Welcome to the rest of the world! Data isn't free to transmit. There are limited quantities of it. Being a scarce resource, it either has to be metred out, or you have to put up with large amounts of contention to an uncontrolled resource where there's no incentive to upgrade the capacity.

The rest of the world still uses data despite capacity caps that have been exponentially increasing over the years. The internet hasn't yet died in Australia where we've had capacity caps for as long as I've been on the interwebs last millenium. I rent broadband from a provider not associated with the national monopolist, at about 2/3 of the national monopolist price, and get a 150GB quota for it on their base level plan. Despite browsing all the pr0n I want, I don't come *near* that plan limit.

HTFU and deal with it, and start paying for what you actually use. Welcome to your free market.