TheDauthi

Microsoft can be bad, but I think Oracle is run on pure spite.

According to legend (I wasn't actually there - this is secondhand, so do take with a grain of salt), they tried to convince a company I worked with previously that they needed an additional license for the server that processed backups. No Oracle client or server installed; the logs were pushed via ssh. When they balked, Oracle tried to increase the price two more times. It was apparently great motivation to move to MySQL.

Maybe that was just one particularly bad rep, but I don't think I've gone through a single year of my career without hearing something absurd about them.

Assuming we're really talking about sleep apnea, which snoring is a symptom of, and does affect your sleep in some really nasty ways. The prevalence of memory problems goes beyond what apnea would cover.

Let's talk stats for a second:

There's a buildup of fatty tissue as you age. The soft palate changes in shape, and you're more likely to gain weight. Weight is the largest component, gender is secondary, and age is tertiary. Interestingly, while sleep apnea is more likely to occur as you age, the severity goes down.

Incidence in male population goes to about 20% after the age of 75. For women, it's a bit over 10 - though that's just an estimate because women show symptoms at a different rate.

I somewhat wish apnea was the cause, for selfish reasons. There would be more drive to improve the machines, and as a bonus, these people could start getting treated.

Actually, that's pretty much a perfect use case. "This environment is nothing like where I want it to run, and may even actively conflict with it". It's not really hard to take a chroot and make it an image, either.

For building, you can create an image that is ready to build your application, then run it as needed. After each run, unless you've set up some persistence, it goes back to the pristine state. If you create lots of almost-identical environments, you can use layering to save space (but space is cheap, so...)

If you want to ship an application that way, you just take that a step further. Create an image ready to run the application. Just remember that storage is, by default, ephemeral. It's a config option away, but annoying if you forget it.

I like that I can just ship an image to someone and it'll work on their machine. Great for our OSX developers.

The interesting functionality is the use of namespaces, which are ways to create isolation of {IPC,networking,users,filesystems,processes} between the containers. Docker didn't invent them, they've been in the Linux kernel since forever, but Docker has made great use of them.

Volume mapping is useful too. Most of what it does is achievable via bind mounts, though, volume mapping is just cleaner, IMO.

That said, I've found the most usage out of Docker from the networking side of things, as extraordinarily convoluted as it can be. I have a legacy application that cannot run on any port other than the one that's hardcoded in the application. It tries to connect to itself immediately on startup, too. Obviously it prevents itself from running another instance... by killing the old instance when the new one starts up. Putting it in a Docker container let me run 12 of them, side-by-side, with the ports mapped externally to different ports, invisible to the application.

Just an FYI, I'm not one of the converted. I think the current fad of "Dockerize all the things" is a bit silly, especially when I start seeing people doing things like putting ssh access for the host machine in a container. I have no interest in their tools other than Docker itself. I'm not a fan of their whole "one process per container" suggestion, and basically ignore it whenever I want (you should make sure you have something running as the init system in your container if you do this). But it has pretty much replaced chroots for me, no small task.

Finally, if you want some good examples of what it can do, look at the images from https://hub.docker.com/u/linuxserver/

It runs on top of a user-space virtual machine (xhyve, IIRC) that runs on Hypervisor.framework that IS running linux.

The only hardware I've seen having problems recently were Macbooks. I'd research the model before I would try to put Linux on one. The ones having two graphics processors are really finicky, as I can attest to about my work laptop.

That said, I'd probably check out a laptop in general if I were going to buy one to see if anyone has major problems. I was bitten about 5 years ago with one where the touchpad was too sensitive, no matter what I did.

I wish they'd run this campaign again so I could buy a second.

This is deep nostalgia for me. A bootloader and a toy ... kernel ... were the first things I ever wrote after leaving Apple II BASIC behind.

The local library had no books on anything other than BASIC and assembler. I didn't know what a higher-level language was - never even heard of C or Pascal or anything - I just knew that I didn't seem to be able to do a lot of stuff in BASIC. After a few hours at the library, I thought that assembler was the only option.

And that's how I spent that entire summer. Going over books on assembler that for some reason were in the library of a tiny Mississippi town.

Ralf Brown's Interrupt List made me giddy once I understood exactly what it meant. I still remember that day. It was in some TSR program that I could view while in EDIT.

Next year, I found out about Pascal, pirated a copy of TP(3? 5?) from my friend's dad and didn't touch assembler again until college. But I found the knowledge of how x86 worked useful for many years, even into my first real-world job.

God, I'm old.

SSSD has been really, REALLY good to my group... except during initial setup. The logging failed me several times in trying to track down problems. The biggest one was when one of the our sysadmins had mistyped "default". Everything appeared to be connecting, getting data from LDAP... and then SSSD would crash with an empty log file.

It worked fine on all of our other machines with the incorrect spelling. The versions of Debian and SSSD were the same. I assume some library was different, but I never found it. I eventually noticed the typo, fixed it, and everything started working.

That was a couple of years ago. After those initial debugging hurdles, it has "just worked" through upgrades and major software changes.

I'm probably jinxing it by praising it. I'm now expecting SSH to stop working on every machine.

It has to have been possible for the information to have traveled between the parties normally. In this case, it has to have been possible that a photon would have traveled between the two. Since the information couldn't have arrived FTL normally due to the everyday causality problems, it also couldn't have passed through this channel FTL.

Every sysadmin at my previous job (a Fortune 500) would stop the moment that number is off the expected by a few machines, just long enough to verify it's correct. That may be due to having made a mistake like this once. I know that's true in several other large shops, as well.

Source: I'm was the one the one they would call for our team... usually at 4:00 AM because one of our team members (which was also frequently me) didn't document something correctly.

It's file-based. If you have a copy open in one location, open a copy in a second, save the second, then make changes in the first and save the first, you can override the second copy's changes.

That said, KeePass 2.x (which came out in 2010/2011, but some people still use the old version) has synchronization built-in, and on top of that, there are plugins to make it keep backups or update a secondary database. It's the KeePass clones that have their own implementation of the internals where you can run into problems.

I'm late to this one, but the most common symptom is extreme sleepiness during the afternoons, even to the point of narcolepsy. It'll cause all kinds of havoc with your sleep routines.

I got suspicious after falling asleep at work a few times, just an unbearable sleepiness, like I had just taken Benadryl and some vodka. Turns out I had sleep apnea to the tune of 61 events/HOUR.

Saw some last -week- when I was getting a tour of a medium-sized small-parts manufacturer.

"It works, don't touch it" is the motto. Some of the more brave souls had started moving what they can to newer hardware, dosbox, or something, but the machine it was supposed to replace was literally within 5 feet of the control panel, ready to boot.

In so far as there's a "right answer" for the pay-to-win parts of the game, this is it. EDH, in general, is much gentler on using cards that aren't the best and most expensive thing around.

I have a tourney-competitive EDH deck that, according to current prices, costs about $400. That's a good bit... but replacing 4 cards with cheaper counterparts brings it down to $63. And I have recently seen at 2 other good EDH decks under $40 from someone who decided he wasn't going to spend more than $50 on any deck.

Definitely doable.

Might I suggest http://pastebin.com/2PHXi78A instead? It handles a few bugs from the original, and cleans the nested loops.

Wouldn't it -very- slowly lose energy due to gravitational radiation?

I don't know about the parent, but I have tried this - repeatedly, in fact, including taking a number of reading comprehension exams each way, just to see the effects. Something that frequently happens is that I'll mix up side characters. I can only juggle a few characters at a time when speed-reading. I really made a mess of The Hobbit, back in the day, completely mixing up several of the dwarves. And I miss a number of nuances of language - a clever bit of wordplay might pass me entirely. Really, it comes down to the author's style - someone like Stephen Baxter might be on the harder side of sci-fi, but I'm able to chew through his books in hours because there are generally few extra characters. Everything just kinda... proceeds linearly. There's little to track other than what's immediately available. On the other hand, your typical high fantasy fare has to be chewed over the course of a few days if I'm to follow what's going on.

P-Strings (Pascal) do exactly this. The original ones limited it to 255 (instead of using the pointer size), but others used more. One of the nice things about using Pascal for programming back In The Day.

The article says it doesn't know where ZTSs came into Unix, but I thought I read somewhere, many moons ago, that it was a pretty simple choice: prefixed strings used one more byte of memory than a prefixed string for a string longer than 255 characters, and on the systems at the time, that mattered a lot.

It was actually in a number of his short stories in the Known Space universe: the slaver disintegrator. I had a physics teacher in high school who gave us an assignment to describe what the effects of a sci-fi device would actually be like. The disintegrator was probably the most interesting one of the bunch.

The only problem with this is that we might not have long enough for multi-cellular life to recover. While the red giant phase is a long way off, some scientists think that the carbon cycle could shut down as little as 500 million years from now, either due to oceanic evaporation or due to a failure in the weathering process.

You're thinking of Poul Anderson's "Tau Zero". It won a Hugo award in 1971. There are a few others that have worked the same concept, but none so famous or well-written.

While he didn't write it, he did choose to include it. Still, as someone on the fence, I'd really rather just hear about the software itself.

I'm a heavy Rubyist these days, and Moose is one of the very few things I miss from the realm of Perl.

Here's a fun game: the next time someone asks you what technologies you work with or languages you prefer, somehow work in that you like Perl, at least Modern Perl with Moose. Count which one occurs most frequently: people backing away like you've begun frothing at the mouth, people asking if you've ever heard of ANOTHER_TECHNOLOGY (usually Ruby, sometimes Python), and people who assume you're a sysadmin who occasionally scripts something (they'll ask if you've ever used Puppet or Chef).