I actually read the article (I know, the the summary should be enough here. :) It's not any more specific only saying "cancer". If they're not going to say what type of cancer a more sedimentary life causes, them I'm going to call BS on it. At the very least they are too vague and really mean "a slower life means any cancer you're going to get anyway will advance a little faster"; but I'm not sure they even mean that. Think about an easy example, smoking can cause cancers of the body parts the smoke comes into contact with: lungs, mouth, throat; that makes some sense. But what does a slower life effect directly that could cause cancer *there* (wherever that is)? Cancer of the butt muscles?

And how many vulnerabilities in Windows 11 have "no patch available"? The problem is that we can't know what the number is because it's all closed source and MS doesn't want to show their dirty laundry. Sure, we know some via open CVE's, but there are others that I'm sure MS knows about that aren't on the list. I will say that if I search for "open CVE's on Windows 11" I get a list of about 2800.

I don't worry about missing Linux patches all that much because I work on stuff behind firewalls with no incoming exposure to the internet. It probably sucks to have to support any server with any OS with internet exposure now days.

You must be doing something unusual then, because any thing I've ever done in Oracle (SQL) is available in Postgresql. Postgresql can also do DDL in transactions, so you don't have use some 3rd part tool to change your DB. There there are all of the non-standard things in Oracle starting with NULL and '' being considered the same thing and no real integer types (those get silently converted to number), and... (I have a good-sized list of things Oracle does that is non-standard or really annoy the heck out of me, none of which are a problem in Postgresql). If Oracle works for you and you like throwing away money, enjoy it. Me, I'll take the ease that comes with Postgresql, and the not having to fight the DB software.

I can't speak to APEX.

The memory leaks that never get fixed. They've gotten a *little* better lately, but FF still sucks down memory from time to like like a process gone rogue. The about:processes page generally don't tell you which tab, but only confirm you do have a problem.

FF just stops working on some pages from time to time while the pages work in Chrome.

Lately there have been more *extras* that have been thrown in, stuff that really doesn't belong in a browser and I have to go hunting to turn them off (e.g. I didn't ask for that weather pop-up and I'd swear I turned it off before but maybe that was on the work computer). Most of the time there is a setting but sometimes you have to go into about:config to really stop them. Their "DNS on HTTPS" broke a few sites at work which was mystifying until I found it and turned it off, because it prevented finding local servers. None of these things is large individually (not even Pocket because it was easy enough to ignore), but it's a large number of annoyances ... as in "death by a thousand cuts".

There are a number of defaults that are annoying, made more annoying because there used to be a setting to control them and make them better (like controlling upgrades) ... but those settings were removed. So now if you're lucky you have to do things to a userContent.css file to "fix them"; or if unlucky then there is no fix. And then FF keeps changing the names or something for no obvious reason because those settings break, and... (it never ends).

Found a icon up top the other day, to quickly bring up extensions, as if the option in the Tools menubar pulldown wasn't good enough. Since I almost never bring up extensions after I do the initial customization I tried to remove it and ... you can't. Why not?

The thing about FF is that it's generally better than Chrome in that you generally have at least some choice ... cue the topic of this article which is a big negative and "kills the user" in 1 blow. OTOH, FF likes to "kill the user" with a thousand little cuts. So with FF at least you survive a little longer, disliking it the whole time.

Sure, for some people their location and circumstances work against them. Live in an apartment or condo and the owner won't help with a charger? You're going to have to rely on public fast chargers or charging at work (if the company does that and most don't) ... if this the case, an EV may not be a good choice for you. Live in house that has a small (100A or less) electrical mains? Yeah, that can get expensive to upgrade and it sounds like what your father ran into. That's a sucky situation also.

However, if a person lives in a home where they have an electric dryer in the garage, plug into that when you need to charge and you'll probably be good. You can even purchase your own charger box with a dryer plug and install it yourself. Don't have that or have a small mains? Consider plugging into a 120V receptacle. Sure, you'll only get about 30-40 miles of charge a night, but that's the average of what most people drive per day. You can double that by getting a small charger device that plugs into 2 120V receptacles which are on different breakers (and don't run anything else on those circuits) to get a low 240V circuit for 60-80 miles per night. They also make these "collars" for your electric meter where you can connect a new circuit and then run that to a 240V plug if the run isn't too long. If you're in a home, there are enough options I'd be surprised if 1 of them didn't work unless there are very exceptional needs.

Looking that course up it seems that's about proving algorithms and other stuff, so maybe you do need more advanced math skills for such a theoretical course. My 39 years of experience is that 2 years of high school algebra is good enough for the typical programmer. I've worked 2 jobs in my time where higher math was needed, but the employer hired someone with a Phd in math to figure out what needed to be done, the rest of us did the UIs, the DBs, the infrastructure, etc. I'm not dismissing higher math, there are places where it's useful, but most programmers don't need it. Hmm, I also see that course isn't required to graduate, so some of those students shouldn't be taking it if they're not sure of their skills/knowledge.

I admit I've not worked in this sort of business, however I have worked on defense contracts where security was priority #2, right behind making the thing we were working on work. Convenience was far down the list. You can have a connection that writes outward only, hence you can get your data in near real-time but the system itself can't be changed from the outside. In the worst case, you copy the needed data to some media that is moved to an outside network, do that on whatever frequency is required, whether hourly or daily ... that's what we had to do on the defense project and we used mag-tapes and printed reports (ugh). I'm sure there are other ways to accomplish the needs and still be secure (your VPN idea is probably one). The point is there are ways to make breaking into these sorts of system dang near impossible by people sitting in another country; we just need to spend some money and do it, which I suspect is what's really stopping it because many won't see the need until some place is broken into and people are injured or killed because chemicals were dumped into the system incorrectly.

I wished I had mod points because you deserve a +5 Insightful for that. Really, why are we so lazy? I understand wanting all of that stuff on a network, but put it on a private network that you can only get to if you're at a company site. No bridges either, it's special terminals on the private network or you can't access it. Yeah, it makes things more inconvenient, but that the way it goes: it's always security versus convenience ... pick one.

Of course it will because "I don't know" isn't in the training data. If an LLM can't find good word associations, where a lot of the weights are very high, it can only work with the lower weight associations (unlikely to be right), and at worst will take the lowest weight association, which is probably guaranteed to be wrong. It would be nice if the models had a built-in rule such that if the weights fall below a certain threshold that the model would return "I don't know" or "I can't do that", but that's not in the LLM's company best interest, is it?

If you looked at their website, I hope you notice that they're planning on releasing *this year*, so they should have a really good guess on the cost, which they say will be in the [probably upper] 20's. I believe their goal of $20K was based on using the $7500 tax credit for EVs that Trump recently killed in his Big Ugly Bill.

Can't say journald really works based on my very recent experience. Ubuntu did an upgrade to my 24.04 LTS system. When I rebooted after that all I got were black screens, not even a mouse pointer, which told me X wasn't running. I could ssh into the system just fine, which is why I could tell that the logs were worthless as there weren't any errors shown, or at least nothing about video just some apparmor warnings. Eventually I figured out that the upgrade broke the Nouveau (the OSS nvidia) driver. I'd been wanting to move to the proprietary nvidia drivers for a few games and so took this as a sign that now was the time. Once that driver was changed, my system booted normally. Yes, the upgrade created the problem, but the systemd logger was useless in helping me.

Nope, not ignorant but useful. You've already got a working wheel when systemd comes along with its strange unit file syntax that you have to look things up every time you have to work on it (because it's not like it's done it daily to keep it in one's mind). It's really nice to point the unit file to a shell script to start something ... a shell script that's really easy to run on its own and especially to debug, or at least I've never found a way to debug a unit file and get something as useful as what "bash -x $file" gives me.

BTW, creating a new init script wasn't creating a "new wheel". There was a template you could copy, fill in the unique parts, "ln -s" the "S" and "K" files in the proper "rc.d" dirs, and you were done. It was easy to understand and easy to do as an advanced user or a sysadmin, or the creator of a product that needed init files for new services.

A big reason so many distros jumped onto the "systemd bandwagon" is because distros couldn't get their act together and ignored the LSB. Let's not forget that systemd also did the LSB equivalent of putting files in common places so all distros started looking the same from a config standpoint. If there is a positive for systemd, I'll hold this up as their 1 positive. Anyway, this change allowed the distro to be able to share the unit files and so they were suddenly able to do less work. Why it took systemd to force this escapes me because they could have had it without systemd, but they chose to go their own way ... then again, why have a new distro except to go your own way, so I probably shouldn't be surprised at the "extra individualism".

Sigh, conceptually it is like a giant EXE even if it's made up of 70+ modules. Trying to replace a single 1 of them is pretty difficult. Last I looked, there are 3 modules you can't replace at all, journald being 1 of those 3. That being said, if I were to replace one, journald would be it; but at this point, it's not worth my time or the effort. I guess I've gotten used to standing in the muck that is systemd and if I really decide I don't want it in my life there are alternatives like Devuan.

Now, I just create a "/etc/init.d/boot.local" shell script, create a unit file to run it once at boot time at the end, then add shell commands to it to "fix" whatever needs fixing ... something that used to be trivial to do but is now harder because systemd makes me create a unit file.

AFAICT, systemd is really only useful for distro maintainers/providers. For the person who admins his|her own system and general system admins it's a PITA ... all IMO of course.

Except that comes across as a non-answer, sort like people telling me "it can be done use KVM" and stop there, then I never find out exactly how to do what needs to be done to make it work (which may speak more of my search skills). If you have a better answer, feel free to tell me or better yet point me to a website with the detailed answer.

My understanding (backed by a search) is containers are used when what's in it is running the same OS as the host, which will not accomplish my goal of running a Windows guest on a Linux host. Some applications can be run under Wine (which I tend to do via Code Weavers if it'll hit "gold status"). However some just rebel because it needs more stuff running in the background. An example of this is I'm trying to move away from Onenote, which requires Onedrive to be running so I can get the info out and port it elsewhere. I've got a couple of others in the audio/video area where there are no good Linux equivalents and don't run under Wine (or I've never been able to make them work); to be fair, the A/V Linux tools are finally starting to catch up so this area may go away "soonish". So yes, it does seems that I need a full Windows VM for the last handful of programs until I figure out a solution.

I suspect you're speaking from a "company perspective". However, what are individual users supposed to use? What else is as easy to have a Linux base install, install VMware Workstation, and install Windows for those last few programs it's hard to give up (not games) or find an OSS solution for? Please educate me.

That there is more bot traffic may become true as some (many?) people will use "AI agents" to do things, but also some of us won't be using "AI agents". If enough people say "I don't want to use them" or "they don't work for me", then perhaps it won't be so bad the the concern is over-blown.

I don't think so. To evolve would be to change species and probably more like changing its genus or even family; usually it also means to go from simpler to more complex. At best this is "natural selection" and it's probably not even that as it sounds like it just used a different part of its genetics that it has previously not used. Can we please us the correct word? I'll suggest "changed".