Add in that they are just a shitty bank for record-keeping. Anecdotal, but they lost a motorcycle title I'd borrowed money (from someone else; HSBC bought the loan) for and then paid off...Cause I sold the bike. They sent me a release of lein and told me to pound sand when I asked for money to cover the lost-title costs.

Don't do business with HSBC if you can avoid it.

Everybody talks about Wal-Mart being a detriment to local businesses. This should push business back to local firearms dealers, which is great for local business! Thanks, Wal-Mart!

(I don't buy my guns from chain stores.)

I've owned a few RasPis over the years...They all sit unused and I run ODROIDs of some flavor (C2, XU4, soon an N2) now. There's just no reason for me to mess with the Pis when there are much faster/better alternatives out there.

I used to maintain a few FreeBSD ports...Not nearly the scope of maintaining a full distro, but my experience was similar. One thing they didn't get into that was a big problem for me was feeling like I was responsible for the problems created by terrible OSS projects' awful RE practices...Yes, I'm looking at you, OpenArena. When the majority of the work is dealing with people that run terrible projects in order to figure out what's needed to build their terrible software cause they can't be bothered to put that information anywhere themselves---or even have an idea about it when you ask them---that's a problem that really doesn't have a good solution, yet the people packaging/porting software for individual distributions have to deal with.

See https://slashdot.org/comments.... for back-story of why I'm targeting OpenArena specifically, but know that a *lot* of smaller OSS projects run the same way.

Beige-black round-logo Model M on my Mac at work and a Corsair K70 with MX Browns at home. I'd probably have a Model M at home as well, but the noise would bother my wife.

I'm a Fed, but not for the State Department. It's nice to know that their e-mail fiascos are news-worthy, but my Service being unable to provide reliable e-mail access---even after farming it out to Microsoft---reliably is just par for the course. Add in our software-distribution system being down for weeks, and...Yeah, it's definitely incompetence. Government "efficiency" at its finest.

Well, we're currently under the thumb of Microsoft BPOS, routed through two very poorly-ran Juniper Pulse VPN concentrators that are in a constant state of flux, and apparently the people making the decisions don't have any idea what "testing" is...No, I'm not sure it could be that much worse in this case.

As a Federal employee, the department I work for can't even run e-mail and VPN reliably, yet they mandate use of those services. At this point just about any real direction would be an improvement.

Project Fi is working very well for my wife and me. Bills are lower than they've ever been since we got smartphones, plus the coverage is outstanding around here.

My commute from home to work is 3.6 miles one-way. Takes a few minutes by car...Almost an hour by bus. I can walk it faster. No, I wouldn't spend almost two hours of my day on a bus, vs. ten minutes in a car. I've got better things to do.

Can they mandate that all of the services their departments offer for employees for work play nice with the latest version of Java within X number of days after a new Java release? Can they mandate that their training stuff not use Flash, Silverlight, or some other non-standard garbage that causes issues for non-Windows users? Dumping Oracle Forms for a bunch of their purchasing systems would be swell, too. Switching VPN providers three times in two years, as well as a revolving door of AV clients is also kind of a drag, as is having several pieces of tech ram-rodded down our throats in emergency fashion, but never used again...The digital signature pad comes to mind.

Cheers,

One very annoyed Federal "IT Specialist"

What makes Scientology all that much worse than any other religion? Let's just kill the tax-exempt status for all of them and be done with it.

I purchased a case along with my ODROID-C1. Cost like $5. It's a flimsy, cheap case...I'll print something better down the road.

The problem with stuff like systemd is the creeping changes it's going to force on other stuff like FreeBSD down the road. Now you've got this monolithic init setup that also rolls in device abstraction and lots of other fun stuff that were traditionally not the domain of an init system. Eventually application authors may start depending on those functions as they are supplied by systemd, and at that point this all becomes a FreeBSD problem, too. Usually the Linux guys can keep their kids in their own pool, and by extension keep the pee out of ours, but this systemd fiasco may be a real problem down the road.