Then guess what? They were obsolete when released and/or were continued to be produced with obsolete technology long after they should have changed. Just because someone kept making it and someone else bought it doesn't change that. It's 2014, five years old would be from 2009 when 802.11n was officially ratified and draft-N hardware had been on the shelves for months. If anyone was buying hardware that only does 802.11b in 2009, that's their own fault for being fucking stupid.

To argue that a technology which is 15 years old and has gone through three further generations since which scaled performance exponentially isn't obsolete is just crazy talk.

As someone who's never owned a structure but has had wired ethernet in every room of every place he's lived, I have to call bullshit. Sure, wiring is harder when you rent, but it's not impossible.

Some landlords actually welcome the improvements, seeing the value in modern connectivity, and allow more traditional wiring to take place. My current rental house is like this and over the month I've lived here I've spent an hour or two per weekend with fiberglass rods, fish tape, and a cable bit getting Cat6 from a patch panel placed in the office to the TV, bedrooms, garage, and anywhere else a permanent network device sits.

Others may not be officially interested in such things, but that doesn't mean you can't do them anyways. Ethernet cables are tiny, the hole required to pass one through a wall is trivial to patch over. If you have attic or basement access as I did in my last apartment, you can often follow existing cable or telephone lines from there in to the wall, then just swap the faceplate from the single outlet to a dual combo or a keystone-style configuration. In that last place the laundry room had a vent pipe going straight to the attic. I used that to get wires upstairs for the bedrooms by just climbing up there and dropping some plenum-rated wire down the tube. The other ends followed a cable wire down in to one of the bedrooms and was just punched through the wall behind the box to reach the other room.

Tucking wires along baseboards, running them under carpet, through ducts, etc. All great ways to run low-voltage wire in a residence when you can't just do it the right way. I'd never recommend a business network be done this way nor anything carrying dangerous power levels, but for home ethernet it's perfectly safe and much better than any wireless ever will be.

LAN parties are still alive and well. Yeah, in the era of broadband it's a lot harder to justify the old two-man LAN when Hamachi and the like make VPNs accessible to the masses and most games support easy connection to your friends online, but the experience of getting together with a bunch of friends and competing or cooperating in the same room is hard to beat.

Just last weekend I hosted a small LAN. Just six people showed up due to the weather, but we still had a great time. Cooperative titles like Payday 2 and TF2's Mann vs. Machine mode are great fun online with a good team, but it's just so much easier to communicate and coordinate in person that it ends up making things move more smoothly even when they're going horribly wrong in-game, making it more fun win or lose. Competitive titles are usually built for more people so we'd need closer to our normal of 10-12 for most of them to work, but topically enough a Starcraft II community gamemode called Squadron Tower Defense works brilliantly for 2v2 through 4v4 (1v1 is doable but has no margin for error).

Look around and if you live near a populated area I'll bet there's at least one public LAN event within 50 miles in the next few weeks.

As a side benefit the whole ability to really be face-to-face with the other players tends to eliminate a lot of the problems experienced in online gaming. Dickheads can't hide behind a dynamic IP and username, so trolling tends to be limited to good natured pranks and the like. Obviously there is the risk of some participants being intolerable either for their personality or occasionally their hygiene, but a good group will weed those out over time.

Not much of a thinker, eh? Ever gone on vacation? Ever realized at the airport that you should have set your thermostat lower/higher to save energy while you're gone?

No?

Ever gotten back after having perfectly remembered to do the above, walked in to your house, and wished there was some way you could have fired off the A/C or heat remotely and brought it back to normal living temperature before you got home?

It's a legitimate convenience, so don't act like there's no good reason someone would want this ability.

Well for the obvious one, hack to control the temperature in your building. That could be done for a variety of reasons; an employee who finds the officially set temperature inappropriate, a prankster, or with malicious intent there are plenty of situations where out-of-control climate control could cause damage and/or put people in danger.

One way or another, as with any networked device security is important and we've all seen how little the vendors care when skipping security lets them get a cheaper product on the market sooner.

Except that many important security holes affecting the general population have been found this way. "Grey hat" pentesting (which I'm defining as unapproved but without malicious intent) is of critical importance for pretty much any public-facing system. The "black hat" crowd will be hitting it anyways, and who would you rather have find the problem? The one who'll report it or the one who'll exploit it?

Sure it's a risky thing to do and I sure wouldn't intentionally associate any such behavior with my real identity, but its something we should be encouraging because the other option is worse.

This is the sort of thinking that leads to me still finding IE6 in active use. If you don't already understand why that's a problem I truly hope I get contracted to replace you when your technical debt catches up to you.

You, like many others, are missing the point. Your app can bundle its own version of Python running entirely from within its own folder. The system Python can remain untouched, and other apps will not even know your version is there.

They weren't saying upgrading versions, they're referring to a licensing/support "upgrade" from CentOS to the equivalent RHEL, which due to their near-identical nature is supposedly a matter of switching repositories and changing out some branded packages. For example CentOS 6.5 becomes RHEL 6.5.

I don't care much for the RPM toolset so I don't know how practical such moves are in the RH world, but it seems like a feasible idea.

Right, because disk space is at a premium. Oh wait, a terabyte of disk costs as much as a case of good beer.

Also, in theory any x86 app should simply recompile as x32 with no trouble even if they're the kind that makes x64-incompatible assumptions, so unless you need to support closed binaries in x86 mode you can trade the x86 libraries for x32 and gain a bit of performance in certain tasks with no notable change in disk space.

For the average Linux user, the only closed binaries they're likely to run are Flash and possibly a GPU driver. Both have x64 builds, so I'd feel comfortable saying that the majority of users can entirely drop x86 support if their distro was to start offering x32 builds.

The question is why a "casual" appearance is seen as "not caring". To me, not caring about your appearance is what I did in college, showing up to class wearing whatever was convenient without having showered or only having done a quick shower without attention to hair and such.

If someone shows up to work clean and well kept, wearing clean clothes, why does something comfortable like a t-shirt and jeans strike so many as "unprofessional" compared to even khakis and a golf shirt? Why is it basically that the less comfortable the clothing, the more "professional" we consider the style?

Shouldn't people be encouraged to be comfortable while working, as that presumably will make them more effective at their actual job?

And to do so they need to get the permission of the contributors, because copyright still applies and that's how copyleft licenses work. Thus the answer to "what about the contributors?" is "whatever the contributors agreed to."

If they contributed code under an open source license that allows relicensing like BSD, that was their choice and it means that either they implicitly approved from day one or didn't bother to understand the license they chose and screwed themselves.

I'm a best-UI-for-the-job type who's at home in a CLI but doesn't turn down a good, functional GUI when one exists.

The Debian tool I'm a big fan of, aptitude, is a Ncurses based "TUI" package manager. (http://screenshots.debian.net/package/aptitude if you can't picture it) Synaptic is pretty much the same thing with a few more features in GTK form. These make it far easier to resolve package conflicts and such compared to the straight CLI tools.

It's not a major loss in a production system where the packages needed are known and mostly unchanging, but for personal machines where I install things I want to play with on a whim a good interface to actually browse the available packages is key.

This is me. I have tried numerous times to use FreeBSD as my home server OS and a few times as my desktop dual-boot, but always end up getting frustrated. Usually it's application management, as any of my home *nix boxes are used for experimentation with lots of stuff being installed and removed. I'm just so used to tools like aptitude and Synaptic that anything less pisses me off, and after a few days to weeks at most I end up reinstalling something from the Debian family tree. Same problem actually tends to happen with Red Hat style Linuxes, there doesn't seem to be an "aptitude" equal for the RPM world.

I use a FreeBSD-ish userland daily in the form of OS X, but don't usually have to deal with shitty management of *nix applications thanks to many having proper OS X .app packages available. Beyond that "homebrew" seems to be the current favorite analog to the "average" *nix packaging tools.

But my router/firewall has been FreeBSD for over a decade now, once m0n0wall but these days its more featureful derivative pfSense. pf is just superior to iptables. These things are rock solid and almost any change can be made online without affecting existing traffic, which is more than I can say for every Linux-based router/firewall I've used.

They're not always, but remember that many games don't have much of a story beyond a basic framework designed to push you through the various parts of the game. When a newer game comes along in the same genre, the old ones tend to be left behind unless they had something that made them important.

The original Wolfenstein, Doom, and Duke Nukem will probably be played forever since they were the defining titles of the FPS genre. The most recent releases in any of those lines, probably not. Need For Speed 3 showed the world that running from the cops was something we all secretly wanted to do in a no-consequences environment. Its official sequel in the twisty Need For Speed line, Hot Pursuit 2, is all but forgotten.

Multiplayer can play with this in both directions, lengthening the lives of some games while shortening others. A shitty game with fun multiplayer, particularly if its cheap/free/easy to pirate, can live on for years as long as the servers stay populated. A great game that's been abandoned by its players for something else, likewise, can die off rapidly. There's a critical mass required for multiplayer to keep the game healthy, and that's where a player who's just looking to play can find a game that roughly approximates what they wanted to play with enough other players to actually enjoy it. Fall below that level and you quickly enter a death spiral as those who are still playing find themselves more and more often without a game.

Basically in 10 years I still see myself firing up Halo or Borderlands if the hardware available to me allows it, as I liked the story. The existence of sequels or "better" titles in the genre doesn't matter, since they won't be the story I want. That's comparable to a movie.

I probably won't, however, be firing up Forza Motorsport 3. As a sim title with no real storyline beyond completing a set series of races for a "Career", FM4 improved upon it in all ways leaving no reason to back up.