Posts by Chris Beattie

Re: The cost...

While it's true that "their" desire for locked-down desktops and your desire for using whatever machine wherever are mutually exclusive, that doesn't really have anything to do with whether the desktops are virtual or not. We have pools of stripped-down linked-clone virtual desktops for task workers, but the devs get standalone dedicated virtual desktops with more CPU, memory, and storage, on their own subnet so they can have their own firewall rules.

When we started virtualizing dev desktops, we worked with the devs to provide them with machines capable of handling the work. They got the specs they asked for. They like that they don't have to keep a physical desktop (with its own keyboard, mouse, and displays) in their cubes and offices. They like that I can take a snapshot before they do anything potentially system-breaking, and one desktop disk failure can't destroy their carefully-arranged IDE. They also like that they can access their virtual desktop over the VPN the exact same way they access it when they're on the LAN.

It's also true that the back end to do this is NOT cheap, but if you're not getting the paintbrushes you need to work in a virtual environment, that's a policy problem not a virtualization problem.

Comparable to Apollo 1, yes. The one I can think off off the top of my head was Soyuz 11 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_11). Comparable to the shuttle disasters, though, I don't think so. I can't think of any Russian craft that could carry more than three people except Buran, whose sole orbital flight was uncrewed.

I would not be surprised if there were more, but the Cold War-era Soviets were especially tight-lipped regarding failures.

Re: I visted here in 1988

I used to work at a nuclear power plant. I never set anything off on the way in to the controlled areas, but at least twice my hard hat got confiscated by the health physicists on the way out. No big deal: they'd let me know when they'd cleaned it up and I could come back to retrieve it.

I was better off than one of the guys, who got his PANTS (or trousers, in Wallace and Gromit's English) confiscated. He received a pair of paper "modesty shorts" for his trouble.

I was way, WAY better off than another worker, who got sent home in a whole paper suit. His car broke down in the rain on his way home, and his suit disintegrated while he was repairing the car! When he finally got home, he had to honk the horn until his wife came out, so she could get him a towel.

Re: It's competition (how unfair)

Where I live, the cable company tried to tell my that my "promotional rate" was expiring, two years in a row. Meanwhile, a friend in a nearby city subscribed to the same service and speed, but in which Google plans to deploy fiber, got a letter from the cable company saying that they were bumping him from 15Mbps to 45Mbps, with no change in his bill.

Re: Missing poll option

Yes, they do. I know, because I have it. You have to have a grandfathered unlimited data plan to start with, and you can't buy a new phone on contract or they'll change your plan. When my 3G phone died, I bought a 4G phone from eBay. I took it to the local Verizon store to purchase a 4G SIM for it and get it activated.

Now, whether Verizon does any rate limiting or not, I can't tell. I work in the sticks where the phone switches between 3G and 4G often, but my current phone has lost enough of its little metal mind that even on good wi-fi at home it would be charitable to call it "sluggish". But my bill doesn't change whether I use 3GB in a month or 13.

Re: Anyone using 4K monitor in Linux?

I am. I got one of the ~$600USD Samsung 28" UHD displays last year. I'm running Ubuntu 14.04 still. I toyed around with the display at work before I brought it home. There wasn't anything I could get my hands on that could drive it at native resolution. I knew the integrated Intel graphics on my home PC would surely be even worse, so I got an Nvidia GeForce 750Ti too, because I figured that had the best chance of driving it at 60Hz without spending even more money and the proprietary drivers aren't hard to install in Ubuntu.

I don't think anything I do even needs that many FPS. I don't game on that machine. It sure does make photo editing a lot easier, though. I have an older DSLR whose images nearly fit on-screen at 100% zoom, so I can figure out that all of my pictures are out of focus that much faster. Google Earth looks great, too. The only "problem" there is looking at a city, it just takes a long time for all the 3D buildings to transfer over from Google's servers.

The default Unity interface isn't a problem for me to use. I never bothered to see if I could scale the widgets. I still find myself making use of multiple desktops like I've always done, with different sets of apps on each desktop (GIMP in one, browsers in another, copying files in a third, etc.).

Most of the stuff on YouTube that claims to be 4K still looks like crap, but I was able to download sample videos that do look spectacular (Blender's "Tears of Steel" and a Canal+ demo). I don't have a fast enough network connection to stream 4K, I guess.

The monitor was so new when I got it that all the on-screen menus were in Korean, and it shipped with a pamphlet that tried to describe how to set them to English. There was some sort of bug where the language settings weren't shown in the menus unless the monitor was already displaying an image, or something like that. I got that all sorted out, though, and I've been using it for almost a year and never regretted it once.

Re: Will the Redbox application be removed from the PS3 and PS4 menus?

Too right! It was impossible to ignore, too. You got a mandatory giant icon in the menu if you didn't have Redbox Instant installed. You had to install the app just to get a normal-sized icon.

"0.4% is just the number logged with Sony as faulty - and likely in itself is understated. Thousands more will be returned to vendors, or not yet logged. And yet more will remain unopened until Christmas - likely this is a few percentage points of failures for such widespread complaints...Sony have real issues here."

Okay, I've read comments like this more than once now. The rate of manufacturing defects has nothing whatsoever to do with when the boxes are opened. Nobody is cherrypicking broken-but-unopened PS4s to save them for Christmas. For the people that do end up with a broken PS4 on Christmas, they will probably exchange their hardware at their retailer or Sony at the same rate they are today.

There may indeed be a bump if retailers' returns aren't counted in that 0.4% yet, but waiting until Christmas to open the box will not change the rate at which PS4s are returned. It may increase the absolute number of returns, but there will also be at the same time a corresponding increase in the number of working consoles that are not returned.

Re: Good!!

Agreed! The cost per message was completely out-of-line with the actual costs of the service. The market was bearing it, however, until there were enough smartphones that other messaging services could perform the same function. What I hope happens is that the competition will bring the costs of SMS in line with the other messaging services.

It doesn't have to be free, but if carriers want to keep making money from SMS, they need to be able to compete with free services.

Facebook has Lists, by which you may categorize your friends. It's actually had them for a while now, but it wasn't until Google+ did it better with Circles that Facebook improved the interface. However, Lists still give off a "Me, too!" vibe, even though they predate Circles.

@Michael Miller

I was hoping for an Impossible Mission throwback, myself.

"Ah, another visitor. Stay a while. Stay FOREVER!"

"Destroy him, my robots!"

"AAaaaaaAAAaaaaa...."

Re: Cupola, Windows in space?

I am not a rocket scientist, but here's my guess.

Pressure is one part of it. The pressure exerted by the deep ocean on a submersible is many times higher than the pressure exerted by the atmosphere inside the station. However, the ocean pressure is inward relative to the submersible but outward relative to the space station. I seem to recall the shuttle is pressurized to less than one ATM to reduce the stress on the hull, and I would not be surprised if the ISS did the same thing.

The other thing is debris. At orbital velocities, even something as small as a paint chip carries a lot of kinetic energy. A piece of metal hit by such a particle could deform on impact, cushioning the blow, maybe even springing back to shape if the hit was small enough. Glass would be more likely to chip or crack. I imagine that the cupola resembles those on tanks and other armored vehicles is entirely on purpose.

In the event that a pane is damaged, it seems like it would be more easily covered if you only have to patch over one port to keep your atmosphere contained rather than a whole dome, too.

Uninstalling old versions

"So you get the update but does not remove the older versions of the software.....

For what reason is that?"

Some applications are tied to a particular version of Java. For example, until recently Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager did not run well under a JRE newer than 1.6u7. Symantec has since fixed that problem, but I had to keep the older JRE around until then. I did, however, keep up with the newer versions while that was going on.

Adobe Reader 9 has the ability to uninstall previous versions going back to version 5 or 6. I don't recall if 8 does, though.

@Robert Carnegie

I use a combination of Adblock Plus and NoScript on Firefox. If I like a site enough, I'll tell ABP to allow ads on that site, but NoScript is still there to stop the annoying Flash-based ones. That still leaves animated GIF ads, but for years Mozilla's browsers have had the ESC key as a hotkey to stop animations, so it's not so bad.