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cloudsec9

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First, a disclaimer - I don't like the idea of 82-0 philosophically, as it supposes that perfection is the goal; sports like life are imperfect, and even the best teams go through bad stretches. :)

That said, I see the appeal, so: there are a few spots to pick up stats for little or no cost, excluding of course the current years games. I think that's okay, as you'd want full year coverage, not pro-rated bits.

My question is whether you want to download ALL the stats as one chunk (seems unwise), or it little bits? I've heard of 82-0 but not sure if that's a commercial endeavor or just a fun exercise.

I'm not at my main machine ATM, but will circle back and post some URLs that stats are available at later today.

It's a clickbait title (aren't they all?), but the premise is weird too -- because I don't see anything preventing the use of a RaspPi -- the offhand remark is that their has to be "redundancy"... but I'm going to guess you could build something a bit more redundant with a Pi if you wanted?

The video is interesting (and the main guy does lots of cool road vids), but the Pi thing is just odd.

"The basics are simple" ... hrm. I think the concepts of how Twitter works is simple; but during their "fail whale" days, they had to reinvent things on the fly to achieve scale and reliability.

Twitter used to have lots of moving parts, and money flowed from various ads and placements, and that was much more complex then I think people appreciate. With their new head twit, they destroyed most of their ad revenue stream and are now hyping paying for APIs and posting privileges, and it shows.

My main irritation is that people say it "works fine", when lots of crap is broken all over, and it now has regular outages. They have shipped like ONE feature that was mostly done earlier since the takeover.

Okay, I understand what you are trying to say, but some of what you are using as examples doesn't support your argument. Games, unless they are simple single player games, need the network. Scientific sims and math research are best served on the latest hardware, which often needs the latest OS/software to get the most out of it. I think your arguing that MOST software should run without needing to be updated, and when we lived in a dial-up world and before, that was a very viable position. But with all of our machines on an always on network, the OS has to be kept up to date.

Most businesses just want things to work; their software/hardware costs are often rounding errors when amortized over their lifetime. I'm sympathetic to users who have paid for programs wanting to run them forever, but software businesses have to make money and sell new versions, so they add new features and follow the OS upgrades. It's hard for businesses to support older software or a big diversity of versions; it's why companies mandate a standard and try to enforce it.

With Microsoft, they are making millions on OS and related basic programs, and so can afford to support things for a long time. With OSS like Linux, there is less funding and less people who are interested in running old versions. As someone who has had to keep some software up to date on Linux, it can sometimes be more of a pain to update a package (because of dependencies) them to just recompile the thing from source. The 5 years that LTS releases get are good for 2 average commercial update cycles, which I think is reasonable. Beyond that, people's skills are going to be out of date.

Another operating system that deserves mention for 286 class machines is Coherent. This was an Unix like OS you could buy for $99, and it had all of the various Unix utilities and came with a HUGE manual to help you learn it.

They had a 386 version as well, but went all in on getting X-windows and graphics working, and ignored TCP/networking just as the Internet started to gain a lot of traction. Still an interesting OS to look at!

At our school, the "computer" teachers were often teachers who were specialists in other areas that had some interest in computers, and weren't very ... security aware. They all had admin/root user access, and they'd often forget to sign out, leaving us with the keys to the kingdom, at least temporarily.

We figured out how to create a SUID shell, so we could get back to root even after we head logged out. Poking a few bytes would have been more interesting!

At one time I was a big advocate for Unix/Linux on the desktop, but I think that ship has mostly sailed.

But, it seems that FUD about what it is capable of is still actively here, which is good to know. With frameworks and libraries, there is a 0% chance you don't have SOME update for your Windows app in a couple years, forget 5.

Now, there are lots of headwinds against Linux -- Windows is a known quantity, everyone knows the MS Office suite, people hate change and don't want to learn new stuff.

But to pretend that Linux is a house of cards because there are sometimes issues that cause troubles is not being honest. Even Windows can have big issues, or have we forgotten the CrowdStrike outage earlier this year?

All OSes have always had issues; that's why all of them have patches and updates.

This is a broken mindset, that you should be able to take an app and use it for 5+ years. When computers were in their infancy, and systems were only updated every 4-6 years, it might have made sense, but this doesn't in our modern software environment.

Nowadays all software is built on libraries and frameworks, and they have security issues and even just bugs, and you want to get those fixes. If you want to run 5+ year old software, you can now do it natively in a VM in almost any computer; so why does my shiny new OS have to run ancient binaries again?

I'd disagree that OS/2 was "worthless garbage", as MS would keep using it for several generations for their server/LAN OS.

I'd argue that OS/2 2.x was pretty much a ground-up re-write, as OS/2 1.x had been written for 16-bit 286 protected mode and not the 32-bit 386 protected mode which the next version targeted. IBM did insist that the new version run all of the 1.x 16 bit stuff, but like DOS and Win 3.x mode this was done through some virtualization if memory serves.

The big hurdle OS/2 faced was being memory hungry at a time when memory prices were still high and when the installed base had less then half of the required amount by default.

By the time OS/2 came out, IBM wasn't a serious competitor for most OEMs -- they were high end, so were mostly competing with the likes of Compaq.

The big issue that no one is mentioning is that OS/2 needed 8MB of RAM to run decently, preferably more, but this was when most machines were 2-4MB and extra RAM was still a big cost.

Slight correction - there were some Borland tools for OS/2, but after the split MS stopped putting out new tools; but IBM did have some interesting compiler stuff too.

More to the point, FDIC insurance covers a BANK failure; but in this instance it wasn't the bank that failed. It doesn't even seem it was Yotta that had the issue, but rather their transaction company, Synapse.

Now if Synapse had created individual accounts for the Yotta depositors, we wouldn't be talking now. But what happened was Synapse had a few account(s) for Yotta and a bit of a records gap, which it seems is making it hard to tie Yotta depositors to their money. What's unclear is if this is a Synapse issue, a Yotta issue or something else.

But the fact that there is this accounting issue shows that there is a gap in how FinTechs are actually managing cash flows, to the risk and detriment of their customers/depositors.

If it was fully disclosed that this was "gambling", then I might agree.

But it seems that it was more positioned as "a safe investment with okay returns and a lottery chance at winning above average returns". Gamblers don't need to know about FDIC insurance and the like.

There was shady goings on that wasn't clear to depositors -- what isn't clear is WHERE that shadiness was happening, but that doesn't mean they "got what was coming to them".

Such studies sometimes ask about the outlets; for some reason conservatives feel Fox news isn't the MSM, while CNN and MSNBC are. Asked about their "non-MSM" outlet, suddenly it is VERY trustworthy.

And these stats hold for liberals as well; they feel their outlet isn't the "MSM", but that Fox is and is untrustworthy.

Since the job of news is now to sell ads and not tell the truth, a lot of "supporters" only hear what their side wants them to hear, and not the facts.

The real problem of course is that each party has different policies; but if we as citizens don't agree on the facts and problems facing us, then there is no way to evaluate the strength of the policies against the problems.

I think this isn't true; it might be that people might not read an eight-part expose on a topic, but they do resonate with many people, some of whom may even pay or choose to subscribe based on it.

To pick up your McD's analogy, I'm sure they did focus groups and test runs to gauge interest and build the product up. If memory serves, they did this in the context of many low-end buffets adding a salad bar and "healthier" alternatives becoming available. I think they added this option as popularity of salads started to decline. I'm sure many people bought them, but it wasn't profitable enough so they discontinued it, in favor of other healthy options.

Now, to pivot back to news, they used to be awash in print ads, both classified and throughout the copy pages, which subsidized their operations a great deal. There are lots of demand for news, but the challenge is how you pay for it. I think it would have been great if the big players (FB, Google) had set up revenue shares with legit outlets; but they don't want to share their $$ pie so we are all worse off.

I understand your frustration, but how does the software manage students that are behind versus students that are way ahead? Like I'd imagine this would be deeper learning for a kid that's ahead, where they can really deep-dive a topic and maybe do some more advanced concepts.

But I can understand it from the teacher's perspective too; They have 30 kids, no extra budget and few resources. They have 20 or so average kids, and a handful of stragglers and a handful of people out in front, and are trying to meet ALL of their needs. Any of those three groups could use up all the time on a specific topic, so you end up stealing some time from one to deal with the others. If there are good monitoring from EdTech software it can help, but lots of teachers are not super techie so things have to be approachable.

It's definitely a space with more nuance and certainly more potential.

As someone who has taught in formal and informal settings, the promise of EdTech was amazing, but the delivery has not really been that good.

To me, a lot of the companies in the space seem to be more concerned with how to maximize dollars sent to them and not as much about how things are improving or better with technology. Tech should be a tool to help the learning, it doesn't have to be each and every part, and I feel like the ultimate goal of at least some of the companies was to create an all-in-one solution for every problem.

It's disappointing. I'm sure the rationale at the time was that it was an under-powered and obsolete machine, but many schools in Ontario were far behind and having these machines go to other places would have been helpful.

But that might have meant software and support costs, and can't have that.

I too am glad they are remembered.

sole supplier free market

I'm sensing some contradiction in that.

Pricing and packaging parts in a way that ensures its cheaper to buy a different phone is the opposite of a free market. Breaking your screen or wearing out your battery shouldn't mean you have to replace both, but it does if you own a Samsung and want genuine Samsung parts.

Did this approach get disclosed when consumers bought the phones, or only when something happened?

For a service that needs to be available to the outside world, I'd say a VPS is often the better practical solution.

Many home ISPs don't allow hosting of E-mail (SMTP) or traffic through to 80/443 (HTTP/S), so you have to have something which does this. "Self-hosters" often explain their setups with a reverse proxy which ends up on a home server.

I say this as a big supporter of RaspPi and home devices in general; unless it's for something like Home Automation, it's easier and more reliable to just run it remotely.

If supply chain was the issue, surely they could have worked to create a more local source for things; but it seems like a flavour of corruption to use slower and inferior machines instead of trying to leverage the best of both.

My feeling from the article was that he worked outside the box, and THAT was simply unacceptable to the authorities, no matter how good the underlying technology was.

Your comment doesn't seem consistent, so I'm not sure if it's just disorganized or actually false.

You state that non-US healthcare "wouldn't have paid for this either", but later you mention "need to travel to the US because there are no [PB] centers" (which is true). But then you continue "the doctor wouldn't have even considered it as a treatment option".

Now, I'm not an expert at PB treatment, but the fact that patients have to travel would suggest that at least some do that; I'm not sure if the treatment is partially or fully covered. But a quick Google seems to suggest that this option is known, and that there is lobbying to create such a center in Canada; and they acknowledge that the treatment, lasting 6-8 weeks in a distant city can be challenging.

But if it isn't an option considered or offered, why bother to build something with no demand?

The ICON was the first computer that I used that had a multi-user interface. Teachers were not trained well and "computer security" was not something that had yet seriously entered our language. While programming them for class was interesting, the real fun was trying to get "cool stuff" to work. We learned BASIC and Pascal in class, but we hacked C and wrote interesting shell scripts after our code worked. Kind of cool to see where it ended up (with BBY and all).

Are there any working examples still out there?

Well, I don't think that the student population will shrink by 95%; there are still lots of people who can get loans who think it's worth investing in their kids. And while there are a few higher-ed for-profits out there, most Universities and Colleges are not making profits of any kind. Some big ones might have general endowments, but most schools run break-even -- where would they get money to float loans? A big part of why higher ed jacked up tuition was because State and Federal spending was cut; I'm sure they'd be overjoyed to get better base funding and cut tuition across the board.

While I agree with this in principle, I think many/most employers are looking for some kind of accredited proof. Even certifications can be gamed, so completing even a short program still does have value.

The value of education to some isn't knowledge, it's how that contributes to your ability to do or get a job, and that is sad. Having a well-rounded and whole person isn't seen as valuable, when it actually really is.

The author seems to yearn for yesteryear, when having "a degree" gave you a leg up on getting a job. But, when you finish high school, you often aren't capable of doing a job out of the gate either. Before, employers would train employees and give them a leg up. Nowadays, employers expect workers to have a good amount of understanding before even starting -- so a 2 year program of some sort.

I do think that there have been both state and federal cuts to higher ed, which have shifted things so that tuition is a much higher % of the pie for learning institutions then in the past.

The easy thing would be to boost those payments again, or give grants/"forgiveness" to those in challenging circumstances.

I'm not sure restricting higher-ed to the ultra rich is the panacea you think it might be. Because what you are doing is creating a system where only the rich, or the upper-middle class (who can cosign or take out loans on behalf of their kids) get educated.

The whole purpose of these programs is to put advanced education into the sphere of people in more difficult circumstances.