Comment Re:I know you're trying to be funny, but... (Score 1) 739
How did this load of crap get +5 Insightful? Oh that's right, it's Slashdot.
How did this load of crap get +5 Insightful? Oh that's right, it's Slashdot.
Smoothly? Maybe, if you never upgrade. Linus/Linux has badly botched nearly every major transition they've done.
a.out to ELF
libc to glibc
VM flavor of the month
filesystem of the month
32bit to 64bit
sound, oh god..
MAKEDEV / devfs / udev
And that's the short list...and just the kernel. If we actually talk about the full OS (aka distributions), my god...it's a configuration manager's worst nightmare.
What the hell, I've got some
The reality is, Linus is the quintessential asshat. Not a fraction as smart as he thinks or boasts that he is, happily takes credit for everyone else's work (while simultaneously chastising them), dismissing his own failures as the peons not able to understand his greatness. And for all this the "community" regards him as a living god.
If you look at it all honestly, it's difficult to find any "contributions" that Linux has done that weren't/aren't already done first and better by others. I'd even go so far as to say the computing world would have been better off never having been exposed to the plague that is Linux, which didn't win the market through technical merit.
I'm sorry, PowerShell is a trainwreck of a language. Extremely unintuitive, inconsistent, cryptic.
Using a function? Call it as function($arg1, $arg2). Oh, did you write the function? Sorry, you'll have to call it as function $arg1 $arg2.
Want to pass a path to something? It's easy: -Path $path. Oh wait, $path is actually a real path and not a glob? You'll have to use -literalPath...if it's supported. Yep, we kept the same failed idea of CMD and decided argument expansion should be done by each command/function/program/cmdlet independently so that we can make damn sure nothing at all is ever consistent. There's a reason why every Unix shell, bash much included, handles argument expansion in the shell.
Sane variable scoping? Not from PS.
Want to use something from
Want output/trace to display in the order you actually write it? When it actually happens? Better | Out-Default all of it or strange things happen.
Most sane languages, especially so-called "OOP" languages, actually stop when an exception is thrown by default. Typically with a default global catch that offers you a nice stack trace, or something. PowerShell? By default it keeps on trucking, not even a peep (bad old habits of CMD are hard to break I guess).
Misspell a variable somewhere? Or a method name? Not even a warning until runtime when it fails (but then keeps on trucking right along, happy to double down on the fail). Even Perl isn't that bad (at least with "use strict;").
PowerShell is better than CMD/Batch. But then, so is a swift kick to the head. It's a horrid language and a bad shell. Bash via Cygwin is a hell of a saner and more powerful way to use a shell on Windows. And if you ever need
Why would you assume that?
Especially when it's the main highlight of Amazon's Prime Air concept video?
Sure, but it's a much, much easier problem to solve.
For starters, flying is analogous to driving only if every road had 1,000 lanes and there were such 1,000 road lanes leading directly in any direction from any point.
Or in other words, it's not at all analogous to "traffic" as folks typically think of it. A GPS module, a few cheap sonic sensors and/or slightly more expensive transponders, with basic collision avoidance software would easily solve the problem entirely. All of which I must add, are already on board any and all drones for the simple fact you can't navigate autonomously (more or less the definition of a "drone") without it. Anything less and you have a traditional R/C model aircraft, not a drone.
And you would be completely correct....except for SEC. 336. SPECIAL RULE FOR MODEL AIRCRAFT, which effectively exempts the FAA from almost any authority over anything that could legitimately be called a model aircraft used in a legitimate way. Effectively it puts the AMA in charge of regulating model aircraft, just as the organization has done with astounding success and safety for the better part of a century.
In general, don't do anything that isn't your core business. Or another way of saying it, Do What Only You Can Do.
If you are an insurance company, is building and maintaining hardware your business? No, not in the slightest. You have no more business maintaining computer hardware as you have maintaining printing presses to print your own claims forms.
Maintaining hardware and the rest of the infrastructure stack however, is the business of Amazon AWS, Windows Azure, etc. The "fantasy" you're referring to is the crazy idea that you, as some kind of God SysAdmin, can out-perform the world's top infrastructure providers at maintaining infrastructure. Even if you were the best SysAdmin alive on the planet, you can't scale very far.
Sure, any of those providers can (and do, frequently) fail. Still, they are better than you can ever hope to be, especially once you scale past a handful of servers. If you are concerned that they still fail, that's good, yet it's still a problem worst addressed by taking the hardware in house. A much better solution is to build your deployments to be cloud vendor agnostic: Be able to run on AWS or Azure (or both, and maybe a few other friends too) either all the time by default or at the flip of a (frequently tested) switch.
Even building in multi-cloud redundancy is far easier, cheaper, and more reliable than you could ever hope to build from scratch on your own. That's just the reality of modern computing.
There are reasons to build on premises still, but they are few and far between. Especially now that cloud providers are becoming PCI, SOX, and even HIPAA capable and certified.
Or it's not at all dependent on those factors.
It's much more a matter of how much someone cares to put redundancy in place. Doing it right affects the entire stack: Code architecture, deployment tooling, infrastructure architecture and costing.
It's a large reason why PaaS is gaining momentum: This is all assumed and it ends up being easier to do it the right way (that includes all this) from the start than doing it any other way, given that most all of the boiler plate aspects are already built.
If you're building services that still require "regular maintenance windows" in 2014, you're doing it wrong.
Extremely unlikely bordering on impossible.
Nearly every possible failure condition would result in the quad-copter falling more or less straight down and into the water.
These things do not glide. Even a partial motor failure would send it tumbling end over end...more or less straight down. When they fail they fall out of the sky like a rock.
Hit who?
No one hangs around under a fireworks display and in this instance it was all over water.
The worst think it's going to hurt is a fish swimming too close to the surface.
Unless it's made of a light metal...then we'll name it Warrant.
We may need to see something similar.
We already have it, SEC. 336. SPECIAL RULE FOR MODEL AIRCRAFT of the FAA MODERNIZATION AND REFORM ACT OF
2012: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/C...
The current issue is that the FAA has decided to "interpret" that section by more or less pretending it does not exist or apply to them:
http://www.faa.gov/about/initi...
The FAA isn't interested in the law. They consider themselves to be a country unto themselves, consisting of all a space greater then 12" above the land.
There are plenty of cars now with thermostats. And they suck big, fat donkey balls.
Give me old fashioned fan speed and air temp knobs any day.
The issue is that the environment instead a car just isn't stable enough for a simple thermostat to be effective. The small size and large number of strong temperature influencing features (windows, hot seats, your body, external air every time a door or window opens) mean that maintaining a single temperature throughout is incredibly impractical. To do so would require a massive amount of over-engineering (far more insulation than a car typically receives and a massively larger heating/cooling system to counter the still large external temperature influences).
And then why is 76 degrees or whatever "comfortable"? If I'm getting into a car after being under a bright sun and 100 degree heat, nothing short of 50 degree air blowing powerfully on me is going to be comfortable. Yet, that won't be the case three minutes later where I'll want it to ease up. That is...unless I'm doing a bunch of errands and so I'm frequently going back out into that 100 degree heat.
Car environment systems have completely different problems to deal with and needs to satisfy than building environment systems.
Yes, and precisely because it's so large.
The larger the organization the more and larger nooks and crannies to hide in and the greater the resources to "defend" (cover up) incidents. Far more ability/resources to do harm, far more opportunities to do harm, far more reward from doing harm, far more ability to get lost in the woodwork and get away with it. The PD isn't unique; the rest of Los Angeles's governmental departments are much the same. From the school district, to the building codes, to street maintenance, to parks and rec.
The economics of scale are never more apparent than when it comes to corruption.
Thank you for bringing up issues like healthcare: Today's "socialist" ObamaCare plan was yesterday's fringe extremist right-wing health plan when it was proposed as an alternative to (center-left) HillaryCare. It's a fantastic example of just how far the "center line" of politics in the US has been pushed far, FAR to the right.
On the whole your essay either oversimplifies the (lack of) distinctions to the point of being invalid, or just gets the points wrong on all counts.
With a few notable social issue exceptions (that honestly don't really matter, but have been great for riling up "the base" on both sides), the debate has marched fast and steadily to the right for decades. Largely not by arguing for right-wing ideas and winning, but rather by cunningly moving the center line allowing them to argue what had been solidly "center" for the better part of a century was now "left wing extremism". The reframe was clever, undeniable, and incredibly effective. It's even snowed you.
UNIX is hot. It's more than hot. It's steaming. It's quicksilver lightning with a laserbeam kicker. -- Michael Jay Tucker
