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From a developer standpoint. I could get a minimal output via a serial port with a few lines of assembly on a bare hardware.

USB requires a lot more work and on Windows the API is atrocious. On Linux the API (libusb) quite a bit nicer, but still a bit of work.

The plug and play part, device naming and unique identifiers are a special "joy" of USB.

If serial port is sufficiently fast I'll take it any day over USB.

What an ugly mess!

Somewhat related: I am amazed now much gossiping goes on in an entirely male work group behind other people's backs. Males are definitely worse than females in that regard. I would not be surpised if allegations were true. A bunch if primadonna devs can be nasty to work with. Just stay away and separate work and life.

"The soldier's lot":

http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov12/07.html

is spot on! Been there.

BTW, speaking of unintended consequences: I just love how on some interstates they put up bright orange lights right near an exit and a tight curve afterwards.

So, you are doing 84mph (speed limit being 75) and go from relatively bright lit area into a dark and a curve. A second of blindness inevitably follows.

Still, I would probably rather just have a higher divider between lanes in different directions, so that high beams can be just used most of the time.

I drive a lot at night on I-70 between Denver and Green River. Visibility of the road is a big issue in the areas of tight curves. When I used to have an older car with weaker headlights having to step on brakes abruptly for not being able to tell which way the road ahead curves used to happen periodically.

Over the mountain passes in spring where the lane markings get worn down sometimes you just can't see anything w/o high beams (and risking to blind the oncoming traffic).

Everything you said is very general. The article in question talks about "Linux servers" (or that's what I read). Speaking of those, could you explain specifically, what is the point of a wholesale update, as opposed to what is described? What I mean is running specific set of services (which most often built from source anyway) and keeping those services up to date.

What you get in return is both stability and security, since you don't wait for vendor to release a patch and actually understand what the vulnerability is.

With wholesale patching, in fact, you can never be sure whether your system is secure with respect to all published vulnerabilities.

Another interesting detail is, that with services running built from sources often you end up with vulnerabilities not applicable to your configuration.

Oftentimes, you can just tweak the config instead of changing code (and potentially breaking running things).

Software updates is just a cop out for people that are too lazy to pay attention to security.

It's very naive to think that you can protect a box from somebody with a local shell. Never worked.

Of course it's a bad idea to make unnecessary system changes (install patches) that bring system to essentially unknown state that nobody ever tested (the order and set of patches installed over your specific OS configuration).

You only patch what you need to patch. Most of the time for every production service you end up building a custom version anyway. Patching does no good to those.

So, by patching you only bring potential harm and overhead of going through change control processes.

Of course I can and will keep up with every vulnerability for every service that is running and facing the Internet.

I do not accept the risk of waiting for some vendor to release a patch. If there's a hole, read the report, determine whether your config/build is vulnerable, rebuild.

Why would want to patch something you are not running or use?

I am running a box built with Fedora Core 4 (2007 vintage). Never patch any systems. Why would I?

If I am running a service facing the internet, it's custom built and patches would do it no good. Why would I wait for vendor to release a patch? If a service is external, I will watch out for vulnerabilities and rebuild ASAP before any patches are out. Besides, 90% of the time my custom build is not even vulnerable to a particular problem.

If I am NOT running a service, why would I care about patches for it?

Why would I wholesale patch a server anyway? If somebody breaks in and gets a local shell, all is lost anyway. If they are not in, they are dealing with externally facing services only, see above. There are specific and counted number of daemons on every machine.

This whole patch-update thing is misguided and for people that want assurances and no responsibility.

"Our" affair is over? Gee, too bad my household does not know it yet and a 2 year old laptop has been demoted to kids machine for playing Minecraft... _Our_ love affair with a PC is over. Likely will never buy again.

In practical sense .NET does not exist outside of Microsoft world. Most of those who mention Mon have never used it (or non-MS environments for that matter). Don't waste time on "Microsoft-Java". Either learn Java, or better yet start with Python.

No, unless you want to shut yourself out of non-Miscrosoft ecosystem. Considering that learning a language is a long term investment and MS's star is waning, it's probably not a good idea.

Having spent 15 years in the US (I am Russian), now I am somewhat shocked when I don't get a smile from a cashier in a store in, say, Billings, MT.

Navajos, who don't make eye contact or smile either also take some getting used to now.

It's cultural, but Russia is a harsh place, so it goes deeper.

The part about people in the street not being helpful to each other is also true.

Just watch those dash cam videos where people witness a horrible crash, drive around and keep moving. You can die in the street and nobody might care. It's cultural and it's not a good thing.

The mob mentality is also a lot stronger. Westerners are a lot more tolerant to people being different or choosing their own way. It is in fact encouraged to be different and individual. Russians on the other hand, have whole layers of culture dedicated to making sure everybody is not sticking out of the crowd and not being an individual.

Russians also like to dress in black or grey. I once was looking at a picture of a group of Russian mountaineers on the summit of a Mexican volcano and realized, that there was not a single red or yellow article of clothing, all black. I don't have any non-black puffy jackets either and I am a... Russian :)

There's one fatal problem with .NET platform: it only (usefully) available for Windows. Who can afford to ignore other platforms these days? Windows, especially on the server side is on the decline. In mobile it never took off. The rest is not really relevant.

The morons in IT department in my current company have accomplished an amazing feat with the host names. We have one host name that I have been using for 2 years almost every day and I still have not memorized it! I am having to cut and paste it every single time.

The host names were invented so people won't have to memorize IP addresses. IT morons here with their "functional hostnames" have managed to defeat the purpose of hostnames, so that they are now harder to remember than IP addresses!

Please please please get a clue, use geography, mythology, Simpsons, anything but stupid "bisappjmpthatthislakdh000283".

These new USGS GeoPDF quads are awesome, but... useless. Most of them do not have trails, secondary (dirt) roads and even forest coverage. These new Colorado sets apparently have trails in national forests, but a sample I looked at (Longs Peak quad in RMNP) had no trails still.

Since it's outdoorsmen that use these maps, having no trails makes them worthless.

Here's what I do. Go to the USGS store and download older maps in (georeferenced) raster PDF format. These are hi res scans of real USGS quad maps. Just pick up anything older than 2012/2013. Use Acroread to print each map in poster mode 75% scale landscape to two 11x17" pages. Splice the pages and you have pretty much perfect USGS quad. I just came back from a hike in Wind Rivers and I had 14 USGS quads with me, covering all of the range.

Another option is this:

http://caltopo.com/

This site creates a seamless map out of the same USGS maps. You can print via PDF using correct scale and paper size. This is great for custom maps (although I still prefer quads as mentioned above).

To USGS: nice try, but until you add all layers present on real maps these are not any good.

No problem for me: one beer either puts me to sleep or gives me sinus headache. Don't understand what people like about alcohol.

It's a pretty primitive drug too. Such a simple and small molecule, might just as well sniff glue, it seems to me.

Tobacco is so much fun in comparison. Quit that cold turkey many years ago. Still like it though.

Have a friend who lived in Texas for a while. Came back hating it. Said weather is pretty bad and there's no outdoors. The only thing going for outdoors is caving (normally we do hiking, mountaineering, climbing, kayaking, canyoneering, etc -- every adventure you could think of). What's good? "Well, if you like food, there are good restaurants". Pass.

This is a move in the right direction:

=== On NixOS, you do not need to be root to install software. In addition to the system-wide ‘profile’ (set of installed packages), all user have their own profile in which they can install packages. Nix allows multiple versions of a package to coexist, so different users can have different versions of the same package installed in their respective profiles. If two users install the same version of a package, only one copy will be built or downloaded, and Nix’s security model ensures that this is secure. Users cannot install setuid binaries. ===

Requirement to be administrator to install software is the root of all evils in managing OS.

As far as keeping everything in a special location (/nix or whatever), this reminds me SCO OpenServer 5: they had all the files somewhere in /var; /bin, /sbin and everything else were just symlinks. It did not work all that well.

I am not sure I am super excited about Java the language increasing in size. As in, the size of the body of knowledge that need to be committed to one's head to comprehend and write the code.

I am actually quite opposed to the syntax sugar features like "getters/setters from C#", "events" and what not. Java the language is already large enough. IDEs do a decent job dealing with boilerplate code. Please, no new kludgy additions to the language.

Those people that need functional features could use Scala now. Jython is there for those not liking static typing.

Why don't we just leave Java alone?

Speaking of C#, it's missing one critical for me feature: it does not run on the platforms I am (or my employer is) using. There are some attempts like Mono, but in practical sense it does not. That is sort of a no go right there.

I like my checked exceptions. I like knowing what might go wrong with a call and I like being forced by compiler to handle it.

True that in typical chaos that reigns in code written by a disjointed group of people it ends up being Exceptions and RuntimeExceptions all over the place anyway. But why should disciplined people suffer?

Please leave my checked exceptions alone. I like then very much. I have not dealt with C#, but did with C++ and I prefer the Java way.

The arguments against checked exceptions that I have seen go along the lines of leaking data types from unrelated code layers. That's probably valid, but I have not experienced it. The rest seems like just whining about being forced to write code to handle errors, instead of letting things just happen.

Like

I said it once and will say again: these off color jokes between _some_ males tend not to happen when there's not a woman in earshot.

So, yes, I suspect strongly there was a good reason for Adria Richards to be offended.

The firing by her company and the reaction of the community just left me speechless. Just plain sad. Why the dev in question needed to be fired is also questionable to me.

Ashamed to belong to this crowd. Unfortunately.

Huh? WTF?

My impression is that inappropriate jokes were specifically targeted at a woman seated nearby. In an all male company (of 13-year old youths) it just does not happen.

The people that did this deserved to be reminded that it was not acceptable (although not by firing).

Now, firing Adria Richards is entirely beyond my understanding. Seriously, WTF? Well, this whole story is sad. Blame the messenger now?

When I was a teenager I worked in a kitchen. A few times. Worst. Thing. Ever. 20 hour day, 4 hours of sleep, then a day off (regular work). Then another shift, sometimes. Back breaking. Absolutely worst. Still wonder how people do that. Shudder. Had recurring nightmares for the next 20 years about being drafted again.

It's more secure because you don't have to delegate admin access to random people to install the software. Any of these "RAT kits", I guarantee you, requires admin access to the system at one point or another, be it during the install, by explicitly asking for admin password, or implicitly by using the fact that most users are logged in as admin.

The reasoning is simple: if no random third parties ever get full control of your machine, than most likely the OS is going to stay intact (with the exception of possible local privilege escalation exploits).

If the OS is intact, the job of checking whether a user environment is compromised is easy and actually doable (as opposed to the case of trying to find malware on a compromised OS).

If, in addition, a user account has limited privileges (which it should of course), then even when compromised the chances of malware being able to do a lot are a lot less. For instance, turning off a webcam light being a root is probably easy, otherwise probably not. Setting up a server, listening for incoming connections and punching a hole in local firewall as root is available, but as a regular user is not.

Stop giving admin rights to your computer to random people (install software as an admin) and live much happier. As an additional benefit, there's never a situation 'I installed this and now computer is messed up, because Joe-the-dev ran "rm -f " with a wrong path as a parameter'.