How foolish and for what specific workload? I have a gaming rig where I sometimes edit photos and do 3d design and some light coding. In the past 10 years I've never seen any visible data corruption and not had an inexplicable crash.

So tell me again why I should spend the money? Your once a week problem sound note theoretical than practical.

Are they guaranteeing throughput? Then it's meaningless for most folks. It's like putting tires rated for 200 MPH on your care and assuming it will now go 200 MPH.

Presidents, governors and mayors all do this kind of thing -- call up private businesses and ask them to do stuff. The mayor may call a local business and ask it to reconsider withdrawing its sponsorship of the local youth baseball league. The governor might call up union leaders and senior management in a strike, particularly if it affects things lots of people need like transit or health care.

This is the exercise of *soft* power, of influence rather than of compulsion. Obama can't call Apple and compel them to change their stance. But he can call Tim Cook and *persuade* him, possibly with more success than Michael Lynton, particuarly given that the two may be having some kind of dispute. Ego *does* play a role in CEO decision making.

Aesthetics always come after the technology has matured. Think back to the days of colour. The movies first shot on new colour processes would go out of their way to use those colours. Think the release of Technicolor which resulted in the hyper saturated colours you see in the likes of the Wizard of Oz. It was a long time before Technicolor process was mastered and made its way into regular movies. 3D is the same. We went through an endless period of directors wanking in the faces of movie goers with unnecessary camera angles that only exist to make sure some 3D pointy bit is directed at the audience. That is slowing down a bit now and the most recent 3D productions I have seen have avoided the gratuitous displays of 3D-ness.

HFR is no different. Motion blur and lower frame rates were relied on for features of some movies. Directors need to adapt to the new medium to make it look more natural. But in every possible way technically superior should equate to aesthetically superior when done properly. There is nothing aesthetically pleasing about a blurry jerky movie scene and right now I prefer the soap opera look.

Philosophy != Science, but both have their place.

There are plenty of avenues for creativity, discussion, unproved hypotheses etc, but peer-reviewed magazines are not one of them. That way, everyone can distinguish solid, confirmed results that can be relied upon, from unproved assertions or tentative conclusions that might be right - or might not.

Scientists are free to follow hunches or interesting leads; nobody is stopping that. But there has to be a clear indicator of the reliability of information, and solid peer review of methodology is the best method we've found of determining that.

If you think the goal of systemd was faster booting then you have some reading to do. Like a lot of reading.

Voice mail etiquette.

(speak slowly and distinctly here) Hi. This is (your name). My number is (your number).

(speak normally here) Now state the situation as clearly as you can. But be brief. This is a message. Not exposition.

End with repeating your name (slowly and clearly) and your phone number.

Thank you.

The easiest way to do this is to realize that you MIGHT run into voice mail before you pick up the phone. Go through the message in your head before dialing. This will cut down on the uh and um and huh and em and other noises.

You're right! That's, um, the, uh, problem.

"People north of 40 are schizophrenic about voice mail," says Michael Schrage.

Bullshit. I'm old and I hate voice mail. No one knows how to leave a message and they're just going to follow up with an email or come see you in person anyway.

If you're just going to leave a message that says "call me back" then send an email or a text or an IM. Or use the scheduling function in email to set up an appointment with me.

The worst offender was a manager I worked with some years ago. He would do the stream-of-consciousness thing whenever he got voicemail and you'd end up with 10 sentences covering 10 different topics. Which I would then turn into 10 different email messages and send back to him.

It's communication! It is NOT the same as talking. Just because you're talking does NOT mean you're communicating.

I actually use yellow tinted goggles after 6PM this time of year. The sunlight is so short and weak this time of year my sleep schedule gets totally messed up. When that happens in the summer I just get up in the middle of the night and work until bedtime, but that doesn't work here in December because there's not enough light during the day to get synced up.

So I try to go outdoors every day for an hour around noon, particularly if its overcast. And I wear those stupid goggles after 6PM, which is a PITA but beats lying in bed awake all night only to fall asleep at noon.

The particular pair I use (Uvex S1933X) cost only $8 and are, surprisingly, optically pretty good. There's slight distortion at the edge-of-field but they're fine in the center of the field. They don't actually block much blue light, but by looking at color swatches I've determined the cut off violet quite dramatically. When I put them on, all those irritating "blue" LEDS (which are actually violet) simply disappear. You can be looking straight at one with these puppies on and you'd never know it was lit, much less annoyingly bright. Subjectively, my eyes feel less tired too, although the lenses need frequent cleaning.

Another thing I find useful is a word processor called FocusWriter. It can edit ODT files, but it ignores all the color styling and hides all the Windows controls. The intent is to eliminate writing distractions, but I find it useful to eliminate blue-violet light exposure. I set the display background to black and the text background to amber, and those are the only colors on screen. I'd pay good money for an epaper ereader with an amber backlight. As for tablets, Amazon's Kindle App doesn't give you any nighttime-friendly options; the best is black text on sepia, but it's far too bright. Moon+ Reader is a good alternative for ePub files; Cool Reader is a GPL'd ebook reader that can be configured for comfortable nighttime reading, although it's UI isn't quite as polished as Moon+ Reader.

Systemd's scope is as large as it needs to be for what it is trying to achieve, complete system level management. It was never about simply replacing the init system. In many ways it hasn't done anything to init systems that hasn't been done before by many of the init replacements.

But the thing about nobody complaining is that it just plain isn't true. People don't magically create software where there isn't a gap to fill (fucking about user interfaces excepted of course). There are people who think the idea of unified system management able to handle all aspects of process control in one package is great. There are plenty of detractors (especially vocal on slashdot) who will say that this should be managed by a set of 40 different projects, but it appears enough people think otherwise that it has not only been created but it has also been adopted.

It *should* be fine. But I'm wondering what benefit it brings? NetworkManager was born from a need to simplify network management and automate handovers between networks. These aren't typical scenarios on a server which likely has a fixed network connection and a fixed network setup.

More than likely the plane will go down and no one will be able to identify the drone or the pilot much less care what controller it had and if it ran Linux or not.

There are several other open source projects out there for autopilot and flight control. Why should I care that this runs Linux? What benefits does Linux bring to the table?

From what I can tell from TFA the only feature this brings to the table is that it's slow enough to require an entire ARM based board instead of the dirt cheap AVRs that are from what I can tell equally capable on the software level and are used in other platforms.

Is this just Linux for Linux sake?

Except for the functionality which it provides. Something not interesting to neckbeards but critical to about every other year of Linux on desktop user.

Yes and then you just use the commandline to handle failover of network interfa.... eh no.
Well you can use the commandline to automate the connection to preferred wireles.... no?
What about moving between netwo...

Ahh fuck it I'm re-installing NetworkManager. A turd of a system service with a turd of a user interface is better than busting open the command line every time I do something as mind mindbogglingly complicated on my laptop as plugging in a network cable.

It may have its warts, but it does what it says on the box. It simplifies network management in a time where networks are not a single solid stable connection to the host. You wouldn't want it on a server, but you wouldn't want to be without it on pretty much any other use case.