A system administrator can't administrate the system without "that much access." Who controls the access above that sysadmin? Why, it'd have to be another sysadmin...see the problem?

Why couldn't Sony just yank all the Internet connectivity until the machines were fixed?

Oh, I checked. The website made it sound like it was some sort of antivirus program that no one had ever heard of. When asked about it, some customers didn't even know what it was or how it had gotten on their computers. It installed a filter driver for all network adapters and at least two machines weren't getting online at all because of it malfunctioning. All of the customers already had an antivirus solution installed. Rapport started popping up on computers in the era of fake security software.

You should probably get some detail before jumping to conclusions.

I've been uninstalling the crap out of that program every single time a customer walks in with it installed because I didn't know what it was and I didn't like how invasive it appeared. It's good to know I was doing them a favor.

It seems that threading isn't nearly so simple in C++ either; at least, not if you want to get it right. From https://akrzemi1.wordpress.com... and http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/s... it would seem that while initiating a thread as you've discussed within a C++ program is easy, the nuances of C++ threading are uglier than C pthreads threading. Quotes like these make C++11 threading seem a lot less trivial than your initially impressive example suggests:

"If a thread is cancelled no destructors of automatic objects are called; or at least, it is up to the implementation if they are called or not. This would cause too much resource leaks. Therefore, it is not possible to cancel a thread in C++. There is a similar mechanism though: thread interruption. Interruption is coöperative: to-be-cancelled thread must acknowledge the interruption. If interrupted, a special exception is thrown that unwinds child thread’s stack until it reaches the outermost scope. However, interruption mechanism is not available in C++11 either."

"But all those threads computing fib1 are still running! And as they finish, they will write to all those instances of fib1. Which are no longer there, since the stack has been unwound. In its place will be the stack corresponding to the continuing computation that was initiated when the exception was caught. Thus we now have a large number of threads writing to various locations on the user's stack. By the time the user tries to debug the resulting mess, there is a good chance they will all be gone, leaving him/her with nothing but a stack with mysteriously smashed values. Or those might no longer be visible either because a return address may have been overwritten, causing the main program to take a wild branch."

As I am not well-versed in C++, I'm interested in knowing about these things. Perhaps it will give me a reason to seriously look at the language.

It's a kernel, not a userland program. It's never going to be as simple as a userland program, so it's a bad example. Kernels can't have the C standard library or pthreads or the STL. Well, technically they could, but that'd make the kernel code massive for marginal benefit and any kind of library bug would become a kernel crash waiting to happen.

Oh, I forgot to mention: take the hard drive it comes with, buy a USB 3.0 external drive enclosure, and you've got yourself a drive to do backups to!

You can get sub-$500 laptops with SSDs but they're all extremely low-capacity (the HP Stream 11 is $200 and has a minuscule 32GB SSD with ~8GB already eaten with a "recovery partition") and often are netbook-esque machines with drives that cost way too much to upgrade because they're not 2.5" SATA form factor. I have made a fair amount of money buying $350 laptops, slapping a $60 120GB or 128GB SSD in place of the 750GB 5400RPM drive, doing a fresh junkless reinstall of Windows, and reselling the units for $500. When you show someone a cheap-ish laptop with an SSD booting up to a fully started desktop in 20 seconds, they literally see the value of SSD technology.

As you've pointed out, no major manufacturer seems to currently offer a low- to mid-range ($300-$500) laptop with a reasonable SSD as standard equipment. If they did, they couldn't milk the margins on SSD upgrades for their overpriced "enthusiast" laptops. Laptop makers tend to have thin margins on the cheap machines at their base model specifications and make most of their (consumer-grade) profits on sales of accessories (AC adapters, extended-life batteries) and heavy markups for each bullet-point in their "customize this computer" system upgrades.

In my experience, most people also fall into two data usage categories: people with 0GB-50GB of data (mostly iTunes libraries, Word docs, and maybe a few photos) and people with well over 100GB of data (media professionals, obsessive family photo shutterbugs, heavy gamers, people who would download a torrent of "the entire bloody internet," etc.) The majority of them fall into the first category and the ones in the second category will usually spend a lot more money on equipment because they're a different class of user and they know more about computers and how to meet their needs.

Dear publishers who totally missed the point,

Fuck you.

Sincerely,
Everyone who proactively chose to install ABP and thus won't buy shit from your ads in the first place, you dolts.

That doesn't make much sense from a business perspective. Having certifications doesn't automatically make someone an idiot trying to compromise for their lack of knowledge and experience. Sure, it's of limited value (especially A+ and the like) but having an A+ certification doesn't negate a person's capabilities. Why would you actively avoid someone who listed the certifications they've obtained?

I've been wondering lately if any of the CompTIA certs really matter to companies anymore. When I took the A+ exam many many moons ago, I found questions with no valid answer given, questions with multiple valid answers, and I completed both of the 90-minute tests in about 80 minutes. I was not impressed, but things may have changed in the decade or so since then. Do CompTIA certs matter to anyone other than Geek Squad and the like?

Discrimination against (and abuse/marginalization/humiliation of) men has long been considered socially acceptable, and I'd go so far as to say that it has even been encouraged. Men will destroy other men to obtain the favor of women and many women use this behavioral tendency to control men. It's been going on since before almost everyone reading Slashdot was born. Here's one article on the subject; it's an excellent read which I will only excerpt a tiny part of.

"White Feather" Feminism: The Recalcitrant Progeny of Radical Suffragist and Conservative Pro-War Britain

"It was in this atmosphere that Admiral Charles Penrose Fitzgerald organized a group of thirty women to help “convince” the men of Britain to join in the fight against the German enemy. It was the tactical objective of this group to shame civilian men into joining the armed services. This aim was to be accomplished by public humiliation -- the women handing out white feathers to any man who did not wear a uniform. “The Order of the White Feather” and their recruiting methods quickly spread across Britain. Women of all backgrounds contributed their influence to the war effort (Gullace, "White Feathers" 178). The zeal and the scope of this gendered phenomenon was paralleled only by the contemporaneous movement for suffrage -- a movement which, right before the war, had reached a radical pitch. It is in the radical nature of “The White Feather Brigade” -- the confrontational method which was employed by these women toward men -- that a tactical tie is evidenced between the pro-suffrage and pro-enlistment movements. It is in the motives and movements of Emmeline Pankhurst that an ideological connection is discovered between the feminine pro-war demonstration of the “White Feather Girls” and the Suffragists."

> "Call him a bunch of nasty names! Bring up the behavior of shitty truly oppressive countries as if they have any relevance to issues in Western societies! Pull up in a dump truck full of logical fallacies and pull the lever!!! PROBLEM SOLVED."

Whether I am insane or not, you're clearly lacking any remotely logical arguments. Do you wish to continue "debating" by pounding the table and screaming?

Isn't it interesting that the bullying forces of third-wave "Tumblr feminism" have brought this type of behavior about? The ridiculous push to forcibly stuff more women into "tech" by whatever means necessary is no different than the highly restrictive (and largely eliminated for at least two decades) gender roles these people claim to be attempting to destroy. What they're doing is not liberating women. It's simply redefining what women's forced gender roles "should" be and stripping women of their agency in the process. The Tumblr feminists are the ones that need to "shut up and listen" to the women that are saying "this is what I want to do with my life." Who are they to force a different path upon them?

We live in a society where moral crusaders demand that women be liberated from their chains by wearing a different set of chains.

The irony. It burns.

An opinionated article on Slate is not a scientifically valid source. This article is what some refer to as "feelz over reals."