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Comment Re:San Francisco is just an extreme example... (Score 1) 359

There is a huge amount of land in California the middle class can afford: the Central Valley. The air is so bad you are almost guaranteed to experience asthma or allergies, but you can swing it on as low as 30k per year

That's not the only affordable area, by far. Half the state is desert, starting from just outside the L.A. Basin, and rent is extremely cheap there. The freeways make it possible to commute from bedroom communities there to large cities every day. And the air quality out there is great.

Those kids living in LA, SF, SD who make 30k per year? They basically live in squalor(for America). They value the coolness of those cities so much they are willing to live 4 to a 2-bedroom, or get their own place and live paycheck to paycheck,

People predominantly choose where to live based on family roots, or jobs.

Go out where land is cheap, and there's probably no jobs there. It may suck to spend half your paycheck on rent, but it's infinitely better than getting no paycheck... And there's always the American Dream aspect of it. Everybody thinks if they move to a rich area, they're going to strike it rich, too... Sort of an investment in your future that way. Never mind how few make it, and how many people move away after a few years.

"Roots" are pretty simple... if you've got lots of family in an expensive area, you're not likely to move too far away, even if you're struggling. It's a big scary break to leave all your friends and family, and the only area and culture you've known, behind, all for cheap rent you might not be able to afford on your lower wages, anyhow.

Comment Re:BS (Score 1) 359

It's an interesting thought... Usually new people move-in, change the demographics, and out-vote the old Luddites. But if the Luddites start-off by demanding building restrictions before others can move-in, then those who would vote against them simply aren't ever allowed to move-in, so they don't ever get a vote.

Comment Re:WOWZA! (Score 1) 240

I stopped using any apps with adverts in them 3-4 years ago due to power drain

Simple fix. Root your device and install a hosts file made to block ads. Several apps out there do this for you.

Or, you could always keep a charger handy, even one that runs on AA batteries, or built-in Li-Ion.

Comment Re:Caution (Score 1) 117

There's rather little point in suspending a server:

Those of us who do this stuff happen to disagree with you.

even ones that are off outside business hours are better off hibernating rather than suspending.

"Better off" HOW? Hibernation takes much, much longer on both ends, and the difference in power consumption between hibernate and suspend is nominal. When your cluster suddenly needs more power, you don't want to wait 10 minutes for POST, kernel booting, and copying quite a few GBytes from disk into RAM, when you can instead get up and running in a few seconds.

Comment Re:Coupled with systemd and LinuxBios (Score 3, Informative) 117

The third big software factor is the BIOS. "coreboot", formerly "LinuxBIOS", is blazingly fast compared to most proprietary BIOS's. It has made some inroads but is still not available for any commercial systems I can find. So no matter what is done in the other two factors, the BIOS is still a limiting factor of suspend and restore delays.

POST has to be performed by the BIOS when restoring from hibernation, but NOT suspend. So no, the BIOS is NOT a significant "limiting factor of suspend and [resume]" operations.

Comment Care? (Score 1) 126

What measures are being taken to ensure they shame the right people? Get the wrong people, and defamation suits would prob. succeed. Look at, for a relevant-but-in-a-different-field example, the Griffin Black Book - listed poker players who counted cards as outright cheaters - which is untrue since the rules don't prohibit it, that's a casino policy [hint: not the same]. They sued, won, and the company - citing the lawsuit/outcome filed for bankruptcy.

Comment Re:Rebooting is not a fix (Score 1) 136

On the flip side, spending six weeks fixing an issue on a single server running a non-critical, non-time-sensitive service which occurs once or twice a year and is 100% worked around by a reboot probably isn't an efficient use of your time.

In the long-term, it is. If you let issues like that continue to exist, then you'll get stuck with an unnecessary proliferation of servers, with each running just one service, so rebooting one doesn't take the others down.

Not to mention that you'll find that you get stuck maintaining multiple, overlapping services, because the first one wasn't reliable enough for the tasks some department decided to bring-in, later.

And also, I don't think I've ever seen a service that was non-critical and non-time-sensitive. Whatever it is, people won't even try to use it until the very last minute, when they need it to work immediately. It could be a damn web page that just hosts the phone extension list, and because HR needs to call someone about something simple, at 5pm on Friday, that server is now delaying everyone's paychecks. EVERYTHING ends up being varying degrees of critical.

Comment Re:Rebooting is not a fix (Score 3, Insightful) 136

"Reboot does not fix anything, it just hides things".

That's not specific to rebooting... It's more a question of doing root-cause analysis, versus quick bandaids. I'm firmly in the RCA camp, but sometimes it's the companies that are to blame, rather than the individual admins. Some companies are heavily slanted towards always getting the quickest possible workaround, rather than ever actually finding and fixing the problem. It's one of those false-economies, like counting lines of code and similar.

Comment Re:Tmux (Score 3, Informative) 136

For my use cases, I could not find a compelling reason to use tmux

Obviously if you've been limiting yourself to the features of "screen" for many years, you're not going to think you need the added features of "tmux"...

A big one is sharing:
"window can be linked to an arbitrary number of sessions". If you or somebody else has a screen session open, you don't have to detach it from their terminal to see what's on it. You can just attach it to your terminal as well. Works great when you've got a session attached to your desktop, then want to access it on your laptop/tablet/phone/etc. The tmux session will even change geometry to match the smallest terminal window.

Being more lightweight and responsive is good. Saner keys for some functions, like ctrl-a pg-up to access scrollback. And just the fact that it's still getting active development is an important feature.

Comment Re:no one would HIRE them, either (Score 1) 581

Older coders are sitting around doing nothing, and there's gold in them thar hills.

It'll cost you an order of magnitude more to provide them health insurance... Maybe double or triple that again, if the plan includes aging wifes as well.

And while they might be very good, I wouldn't expect them to be as willing to do on-call rotation, put in extra hours when deadlines loom, not use their vacation days, etc.

It's not a bad idea at all, but there's sure going to be some major downsides to a company with predominately older people.

Comment Re:no one would HIRE them, either (Score 1) 581

(I'm over 50, have been looking for work for a while now, and I'm getting nothing; no interviews and certainly no offers. I have a lot of experience and a good work ethic, but it does no one any good if the companies routinely dismiss anyone with more than 2 pages of resume experience,

You're doing something wrong... Nothing on your resume has to show your age, and you certainly don't have to have more than 2 pages, just because you have lots of experience. Resume writing 101. Limit yourself to the latests 3 jobs, or so. Nobody wants to look through a 10-page resume, so if you don't have good-stuff on the top page, recruiters won't bother.

since they are seen as 'too expensive' to hire).

Lots of recruiters ask for your salary requirements up-front. I generally refuse to answer, but if you low-ball it, you'll do just fine. Hell, my last company, though predominantly young, with lots of H1Bs, had several grey-haired programmers, and I recently hired an older gentleman myself, who was only looking for work after his company (where he put in 25 years) went out of business.

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