Prevention versus treatment. Is that such a strange concept?

If people put as much effort into getting off of XP as they spend fighting the inevitable, they would not be facing these challenges right now. Microsoft has made it quite clear that they are going to sunset the product. There have been newer, better operating systems released that provide an easy upgrade path. Unless someone is running a single core processor, Windows 7 is faster and more stable than XP.

And if the newer Microsoft OSes are sooooo terrible, "There is always Linux." (Or OSX)

These "Save XP" articles are tired and played out. Move on guys. When I read these articles, all I hear is, "Whaaaaaaa. I have procrastinated for the last five years and now I'm fucked. Save me from my own ineptitude!!!"

For a community focused on OSS and Linux. For a community that has consumed Lord only knows how many terabytes of storage bashing XP and touting the glories of ANYTHING ELSE. For a community like that, one would think that XP going EOL would be celebrated with much merriment and significant rejoicing. Oddly enough, it seems that one would be wrong.

You get off on being pedantic, don't you?

What's your beef with Sergio Leone? He was a great director and cinematographer.

Someone would have to convert it from the physical disk into data stored on an array somewhere. Either that, or Netflix needs to invest in a bunch of DVD juke boxes.

My point is that the video files, the files themselves, are not already sitting on spinning disks somewhere. Unless the production company has them archived, the masters are probably stored in a warehouse / data center somewhere. While those files are likely "digital", they are not in a format ready to be streamed.

That is a "classic". They have a lot of those on there. I have recently watched a few of the old Clint Eastwood classics on there recently as well. (The Good, The Bad, The Ugly. Fist Full of Dollars)

Are you a Netflix subscriber?

What you describe and reality are about 180 degrees opposite. The reality is that the older movies are DVD only. The newer stuff can be streamed.

My theory is that the newer releases are already digital and the distribution agreements are in place. To make the old DVDs available online someone would have to invest the time to shift them into digital format. Then there are the licensing agreements. Granted, licensing is a legal issue and not a technical one, but nobody is going to invest the time and money required to update the licensing terms for some obscure DVD that was released in 1997 because they know that fewer than a coupled hundred people are ever going to want to view it.

Banks and credit card companies should be monitoring accounts for fraudulent activities FOR FREE. They charge account holders monthly service fees to maintain the account. A basic tenant of maintaining the account is making sure that criminals are not racking up fraudulent charges / making fraudulent withdrawls.

The whole "credit monitoring" industry is a system of a broken system.

The two are not mutually exclusive.

Helping with homework is such a broad subject that stretches from answering the occasional question, to doing the assignment for the kid. Based on my limited experience, the important thing to keep in mind is helping the child develop good behaviors. Show the child that doing homework is important by setting time aside every day for homework. Be engaged with the kid and communicate with them about what is going on at school. Give them some flexibility. "What order do you want to tackle your homework in?" "Do you want to go 30 or 45 minutes between breaks?" "How much of this semester long project do you want to get done this week?"

Homework is less about mastering subject matter and more about developing good habits. Kids go to school "all day". Parents definitely work all day. Those are jobs. The people who excel in their professions are the people who put in the extra effort. Professionals who put in the extra effort usually do it because they are fortunate enough to enjoy their profession. Kids do not get that perk. They are stuck with the subjects they have to learn. A parent who comes home from work and "tunes out", implicitly communicates to the kid that doing so is acceptable behavior. The parent who comes home and helps the kid with homework sets the example that just because they've "put in their 8 hours", it does not mean that they are done with their responsibilities.

Those of us who work in IT inherently set examples of strong work ethics, by being on call all the time. The challenge is to balance the work responsibility with finding time for the family. In most cases, having the discipline to not check emails for 2 hours while helping the kid with homework helps to establish healthy boundaries with employers as well.

One last perk... it helps you get laid. Oddly enough, mothers are turned on by men who help their children succeed. Go figure.

Feel free to consolidate all of the anti-Intel, pro-AMD posts here.

I will get it started to help out.

My AMD chip runs twice as fast at half the power, overclocked to 5Ghz on air. It's totally stable. Only idiots buy Intel chips.

The article briefly mentions this, but does anyone have any additional detail? Are they using opportunistic TLS on SMTP connections?

Earlier in the chain the point I was alluding to is that by 40 years old, presumably with 15-20 years of experience, the hypothetical coder should have enough successes under his belt that he has people to vouch for him.

I am basing all of this on my own career and 15 years of experience. I am at the point where I have people trying to hire me left and right to work on projects. That is a mixture of merit (my past successes and present capabilities), combined with who I know.

You do not want to work for those people. In the real world, people want employees who can get the job done. When people get hired based on personal connections, it is usually because the manager believes that they have the skills necessary to get the job done. Despite the common perception, competition for projects and jobs is fierce in the corporate world. You cannot win projects and get things done on tight timelines with a bunch of incompetents. Sure, there are losers around. I work with a few of them. They are about 10-15% of the population, and on a 5-7 year time line, 95% of them get weeded out.

The above goes for the private sector. In the public sector, forget about it. If the State of California is any indicator, personal connections and ineptitude are par for the course. My wife works for the state, and the stories that she tells me about the frustrations that she puts up with just boggle my mind sometimes.

I am in the same position. I have earned every job, with the exception of the summer internship at the company where my worked, when I was 15, on merit. My first IT job I got through AppleOne of all places. I was making $8 an hour. I landed in my current position through Dice.com after realizing that my last job was a dead end. I had to go through the resume screen, the interview process with a bunch of strangers I had never met, the whole nine yards.

I have seen too many people get jobs the other way, and it has made me jaded.