It's like predicting how these 'automobiles' will be a big part of our lives (news is 100 years too late, but at least accurate). Predicting the future by simply stating the present, brilliant!

xbmc can do what plex does... if you mess with advancedsettings, apply a ton of special filename recognition patterns, set it up to store things in a shared sql database, and trick it into having an instance running somewhere headless and prod it to update library ever so often. For plex, they have a naturally headless server that takes care of all of that.

On the flip side, there is a gob ton of stuff I can do with xbmc that I can't with Plex. One painful one for me is integrate with my mythbackend *kind of* (still missing the closed captioning of ATSC streams, only mythfrontend seems to handle it).

I think my ideal world would be for xbmc to have a headless, auto-indexing library server that shares it's 'advancedsettings.xml' in a more trivial fashion and subtitle support for ATSC streams. The etensibility and community of xbmc with the simplicity of Plex and a tiny amount of capability from mythfrontend that is lacking...

But my ISP provides an SMTP relay. I configured postfix to use my ISP relay. This doesn't really impact my mail service or how it's stored or how it may be addressed/migrated in the future, but it gets me past the common blackhole filtering.

SMTP has just not scaled well and the mitigations have impaired the openness of the network somewhat, but SMTP relay facilities are usually available.

E7 is useful for areas where extremely large memory per core is mandatory (some parts of HPC)

In general, E5 strikes the balance between having adequate amounts of cache and SMP interconnect, compute capability (Haswell E5 is available, E7 is still Ivy bridge, AVX2 being a big thing there), and per-unit cost (E7 carries a huge premium for its benefits, most of which are generally not needed in HPC of this scale).

Even in places where you do see E7, it's usually in a special portion of the cluster for big-memory jobs that can't be split into multiple nodes as easily as most HPC workload, with the majority of the clusters employing something more like E5.

ARM won over in the mobile device space because of solid engineering around a low power envelope, without trying to compete with x86 performance in any way. Basically Intel made a mistake by not having *any* appropriate chips for that space at all. Performance per watt was never demonstrated to be better if you followed the curve up to desktop/server class energy consumption. Intel has actually competently answered in their Atom space, and has secured some mindshare among Android vendors (which I never would have guessed could be possible). Intel is second comer to the party and thus the ecosystem is clearly stacked against them, but they still managed to get their components in the market.

Some vendors are starting to tout ARM based competitors to Xeon. The problem being their energy consumption numbers at this point are actually higher and achieve lower performance numbers in compute and have worse I/O capability.

It's not that difficult. But after setting it up for a group of people and then setting up seafile, I prefer seafile. If you aren't an admin user in owncloud, things are pretty tough when it comes to knowing what groups you are in and what groups can be shared with and such. seafile does a much better job on that front.

Plus the owncloud sync client doesn't seem very good. And the mobile platform clients cost money where seafile is free.

ownCloud might have gotten the 'good name', but they don't have the best implementation sadly.

Yes, it's the fear of Ebola that's the bigger practical problem. However, the remedy for that fear is precisely doing things like declaring an Ebola 'Czar' and promising to deploy the National guard 'if necessary'. Note they didn't actually call up the national guard, just promised the obvious, if the national guard is warranted (it won't be) it will be called up. The nomination of a 'Czar' is pretty much free and convening ' a two-hour emergency meeting with every top federal official involved in public health and safety.' is actually not that terrible either. These measures are not a big deal in cost, but are important in their significance to the general populace.

So someone who is well informed may rightfully see all this as silly from a practical perspective, but I don't think they would perceive a significant investment of real resources in any of it.

Meanwhile those inclined to not be so well informed are assured by some response that really doesn't cost much.

Though that pales in comparison to having the secret number to take as much of your money as someone wants printed in plain on paper checks or stamped into a little piece of plastic that you share with anyone that you give money. If a mobile banking app would help me spend money in a more secure fashion at vendors, I'd gladly take it over a credit card to swipe. It could actually be substantially be incredibly more secure than chip and pin in some ways (e.g. the account holder fully controls the input and display device and can communicate with financial institution without going through vendor provided equipment.

Admittedly, before making a formal business commitment, we wouldn't play 'guess the actual requirements from vague problem descriptions, but:
"his organization has a one large event per year with roughly 1400 volunteers total." suggests the need is highly seasonal and admittedly one month is a bit specific, but you get the idea.

Actually, that case was not site development, but I'm well versed with precisely how much work it involved and even given the benefit of their familiarity with the codebase being modified, I'd wager easily it's more work than this question is detailing. It's also work my team could have done, but we were short on time. My team reviewed the code and only accepted it after we were comfortable that we knew the code provided as well as if we had written it ourselves. This is commercial for profit, but also not in the critical path for potential fiscal catastrophy (and I work those scenarios too, and those are a nightmare and warrant high cost, but you can't be so jaded as to assume *every* trivial piece of work should be treated as such).

I get a different read: " In the past two years, they have used a site written by a volunteer that has worked fine for them, but that volunteer is unavailable to maintain or enhance his site this year. " Note that the client seems *relatively* content with what one guy bothered to do in his spare time that was almost certainly done on very short notice, just probably looking for someone to go in and add a field here, or combine two forms there, or something relatively simple like that.

Even with the obvious editorial bias trying to spin it to state that is the case, I just don't get that feeling from the description and my work with non-profits. They probably have a simplistic site that they want to evolve a little, not raze everything to the ground and start over.

I am very familiar with how enterprise projects work. However you slice it, this is *not* of that pedigree. Small non-profits generally know they get what they pay for and don't have complex needs or unrelenting demands over even trivial cosmetic stuff like is common in enterprise land. There is just a huge world of difference between a production internet presence of an international Fortune 100 company with a labyrinth of inter-departmental nightmares to navigate with a potentially huge revenue amounts, market perception, or liability on the line at any given time and a volunteer sign up site for a local non-profit that only handles about 1,400 volunteers.

Well, two factor doesn't mandate two channels (for example a door access system that requires both a badge and a keycode is also two factor), but yes, two distinct devices needing to be hijacked is better. However, in your example that's not assured either. If the mobile device is used to access the website then it's still one device. There's no guarantee that the user used a different device to access the web and process the text message. It's at the discretion of the user to take care of their circumstances appropriately.

Ultimately, the point I was trying to make is that this is an improvement over the usual state of things and should not be discouraged just because it isn't perfect. This aspect of security is trying to find the right balance between 'secure' and 'friendly'. It's easy to be secure if you don't care how hard it is to use, but making two-factor authentication as the norm for authentication has thus far eluded us due to acceptance issues, rather than technical failings. We have dozens of viable two-factor authentication approaches, just none that most people would tolerate.

The dominance of computer's as something for men in 80s pop culture was probably reflecting the trend rather than causing it. The timeline seems too short for so few pop culture things to influence.

The market for coding evolved at first primarily from 'data entry', which required nearly no training. Women of the time (disadvantaged or disinclined from training depending on your opinion) could take those jobs and men who needed to 'provide' sought higher trained jobs with higher pay. Basically straightforward data entry started to become 'advanced data entry' that started incorporating things like formulas and continued on from there. Perhaps because it started to demand more and more skills, narrowing the labor pool and driving up compensation, enticing men to start participating more heavily and an overall male-favorable social bias started to take effect. Or perhaps the nature of the work fundamentally changed enough in a way that drive a different male/female interest. Or some other factor, these are all guesses.

I just doubt that a handful of 80s movies changed the entire landscape of female participation in the market basically within a couple of years of the first movie's release, and there's a lot of alternative explanations that are quite viable.

Use FreeOTP or Google Authenticator? It's simple yet pretty well secure and allows an arbitrary mobile device to provide keycodes? Sure, you have to actually type a few numbers (the horror), but at least you don't need yet another security dongle that, despite the current hype, will probably be obsolete in a couple of years.

For what is almost certainly a few cosmetic touches to an existing app (that is likely only a couple hundred lines of code to start with) that would take probably 15 minutes to do, you'd charge $150k without any warranty of working, and then basically charge enough to nearly dedicate one reasonable (entry level) full time employee to an app that probably isn't used at all about 11 months out of the year? Well I know who is likely to lose any bids I put out for development work if that is indicative of your overreaction across the scale of things. Admittedly, I wouldn't raise this much fuss over this trivial case to even solicit bids (if it is really simple as I suspect it is, do it in the time it would take to go through the procurement dance).

I've seen quotes from a very good development company that has always delivered come in at about $10k for work significantly harder than this subject. Admittedly I think the owner undercharges for the skill of his team, but they seem happy because they knock it out in a week, deliver solid results, and move on to the next customer. So far my code review of their work has never seen a structural problem (some subjective preferences about some word choice was all) and the work hasn't actually produced defects for my test team or my clients. This is an example of *way* cheaper than it should be, but it helps provide some perspective on how unreasonable the numbers you throw out are. Of course, even with that they still get underbid, but we know better than to go to lowest bidder almost any time.

Yes, this is what I struggle with as well. It sounds like a trivial sort of application and the submitter characterizes it as needing a pool of developers and project management investment. That is a silly assumption, some things are truly trivial things. I had a very simplistic script on a backed up, shared filesystem and did 'git init' because it was essentially a free thing. Upon noticing that I bothered to git init, suddenly people were pushing 'you can't do git without something like github or gitlab, and an issue tracker, but not gitlab or github, but it needs to have integration with those'. Of course I know full well that it's a 20 line script for internal use by a team of about 5-6 people for a very trivial thing, and that those people aren't going to bother with a ticket even if a system was made available and instead just turn around in their cube and ask the entire user community about it.

As you say, this can go both ways, people stubbornly insisting on do-it-yourself and people pushing for 'someone else do it' against all reason. I have seen projects that really could use those facilities above and try to whip up their own gitlab type facility rather than just installing gitlab.

Not knowing all the details, I'm thinking I might concur here.

For one, you can either coast by on the current solution so long as it continues to accommodate the needs or completely change over now 'just in case' needs evolve in the future. The latter frequently is a bad move since you are taking a hit now either way for the sake of a nebulous future requirement that you can't even be certain will be met by your selected solution. This means that if that nebulous future comes to pass, you might have to migrate again and have saved nothing. If the current system works and the events are basically run the same year to year with only cosmetic tweaking, then it would be a waste to change.

For another, it seems like some people are afraid of having the littlest piece of software written in-house. Sometimes a solution really is simple enough that it's overkill to fret overmuch about maintenance and adaptability. Of course a key line to recognize is when you have evolved unexpectedly into the domain where worry is warranted, but a fairly simple facility to manage 1,400 records seems like it could reasonably fit into the realm of simple code that shouldn't be scary. I admittedly have more experience in corporate, but I imagine this holds true in a general sense. I've seen some companies outsource every little need to an unmanageable sea of vendors and get stuck with an overall atrocious experience and I've seen others stubbornly write everything in-house against all reason, so a balance must be struck.