I have my RPi B+ running all my Internet facing services and running off-grid in gloomy London at under 2W, nearer 1.5W when I can fix some transient issues.

http://www.earth.org.uk/off-gr...

And if I need something lower power I have Arduino-like boards that I run on microwatts, eg for battery-powered remote sensing.

http://www.earth.org.uk/out/ho...

I see all the complaining about memory and speed but as someone who grew up with a Z80- and 6502- based set of home computers, then used Sun Workstations with a few MB of RAM and tens of MHz clock, the Arduino/ATMega328P matches the Z80/6502s in performance at a millionth the power and has non-volatile storage built in, and the RPis are and order or two of magnitude better than the workstations and a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper.

I can fit almost all that I need to run with careful use of resources into the RPi/Arduino world and still have lots of elbowroom left over.

Yes, I've worked on big systems for (eg) big banks, but most of us really need GHz and GB on every machine? Some yes (like my MacBook), but most no.

Rgds

Damon

That would be a very good step and eliminate most of the issue with Google, I agree.

However, G also insists on, for example, sending out G Calendar notifications forged with my sign-in email, which is SPF/DMARC protected, and which other systems (and gmail) thus entirely correctly often reject.

But I can't get anyone at G to even acknowledge the issue. (Would be nice if a Googler was reading this and would pass it on.)

And, BTW, G also seems to ignore email other than from the a/c's login address, eg for AdSense/AdWords, which is a Catch-22, and one small reason why I am using them far less.

Rgds

Damon

DMARC would work a lot better if Google for one didn't wrongly try to internally forward as-is *and then bounce* email from DMARC-controlled domains, thus making it impossible for example to get through for many support queries, and causing spurious problems with (say) Google Calendar when the account ID is in a DMARC-controlled domain.

Left hand vs right hand Google? You guys are meant to be smart!

That and randomly chucking email from DMARC-controlled domains in SPAM folders...

Rgds

Damon

It isn't.

Rgds

Damon

The need to worry about *not having proper health cover* as tangled up in any way with changing job would be restrictive.

I have no such issue at all, ie I can change jobs or have no job or do my start-up and it makes no difference to how I access medicine.

Rgds

Damon

Thanks: that was the most level-headed primer that I've seen.

Rgds

Damon

Hmm, I hear what you say, but it wasn't generally stand-alone IT that would be much use outside finance, and I was the CTO of the virtual credit card start-up.

But I assure you that there is no gold-filled vault, no not even slightly full of warm lovely glowing metal; nothing to see here, move along.

Rgds

Damon

It's called "contracting" or "consulting"; I have spent the best part of 20 years working in IT in the City of London, none of it permanent.

I have also founded a retail finance start-up. I'm not sure if start-ups count as freelancing; there's matching insecurity and worry and no steady income!

Rgds

Damon

Yep, it made me the failure that I am today. %-P

Rgds

Damon

For most things maybe you just shouldn't be paying, at all denying treatment to those who happen not to have spare cash, eg students and young adults in general getting going in their jobs. I couldn't have paid anything much as a teenager for my epilepsy diagnosis and treatment; should I have just rotted before I even got to uni? I had left home, BTW.

(In the UK I do pay for a few things at point of use under the NHS, but often even then fairly small fixed/tiered charges.)

Rgds

Damon

Bingo! I would not have been able to do multiple start-ups and freelance in banking and writing if tied to a job by health insurance given that I have had imperfect health.

Score one for the UK NHS, even though also imperfect, for giving me mobility.

Rgds

Damon

Hi,

That is a different and also interesting case, and just by bringing it up you'd pass my test.

No, I meant something like:

public static final String CRITICAL_ID = "whatever"

in a secure API. If I use char[] instead what happens if a miscreant overwrites the content of the array; what BadThings might happen?

Rgds

Damon

Except that once JIT/Hotspot is involved all or most of the executions *are* of compiled machine code, optimised to the particular CPU on hand and the particular data set for this particular job. So things like dynamic inlining *for this particular job* can allow the JVM to produce *better* machine code which will execute more quickly than statically-compiled code.

The translation takes time, but for long-running tasks that may well be easily amortised away.

So single-threaded Java can beat single-threaded C++.

But I can also bring more CPUs to bear on the code safely with Java for a given level of code complexity (well, now C++ finally has some sensible volatile semantics, that's a little less true).

And there are other factors such as the generally forced synchronous nature of C++ heap handling which can work against it.

Rgds

Damon

I promise you that it was worth saving many MB in the .WAR and associated thumb-twiddling time, plus showing me in the logs which library and other routines were actually being used. I never felt the need to time stuff (since performance was at least not visibly worse). Shame on me!

If I get a chance I'll do as you suggest, though it'll be tricky with all the many things going on concurrently.

Rgds

Damon

Umm, I don't think you're holding it right. WORKSFORME.

Rgds

Damon