disordinary

I don't agree.

Systems are more complicated to build with a lot of dependencies that's true, but this is mitigated by shipping pre-built binaries and containers which have the dependencies bundled. Yes, those binaries can be from untrusted sources but if you use those you're taking a risk - the same as if you use code from an untrusted source (just because it's not compiled doesn't make it safe, when was the last time your organisation audited anything), ultimately a business should be using banaries from businesses they trust.

Containers actually increase security in the following ways: 1. They run isolated from the host system and if you set things up properly they should be non root. 2. They're immutable and cannot be tampered with. 3. Because they work on layers you can change them without affecting the underlying container, to upgrade you can just replace the layer that you inherit from, simplifying the upgrade path (and being immutable, stateless, and versioned there's no risk to upgrading, you can very easily rollback). 4. In the example listed above like Haddoop you can install the outdated version of Java that it depends on without compromising the host or other workloads on that server.

Of course, this all breaks down if you don't use containers from trusted sources and if you don't have processes in place.

It works in a modern environment with pipelines and automation, it doesn't work as well in a more traditional environment with sysadmins hand wrangling deployments.

Of course the most secure way to do things is to have deterministic builds of a codebase which creates a hash which you can compare with a canonical source, but this is tricky and not all build toolchains support this properly so you'll end up with mixed results. For a streamlined business the best compromise is to get applications from trusted vendors and rely on static analysis and the ability to quickly upgrade if a vulnerability is discovered.

Ultimately, the one of the best ways to secure a system is to establish an unbroken, audited, and automated trust chain and remove the ability for human intervention.

A lot of it is out of their control as well as there being a scale issue - for instance if you're a country like Niue which has a population of 1,000 and a total GDP of $10 million and you're thousands of kilometres from the nearest country that gives aid rather than relies on it, then you have limited options with what you can do. Getting goods to the country means it has to come from NZ which is almost 3,000 killometres away, that's a lot of oil for the ships. There's limited ability to use green power as it has a high up front cost and isn't going to be able to provide consistent enough power (relying on wind, or tides, or daylight). It's not economic to ship trash off shore to recycle so it's burnt.

Things will change as the west advances, for instance a single wind turbine and batteries could power a country like Niue completely renewably, couple that with solar powered shipping and you start to see a change.

But, these countries have very limited natural resources, technical expertise, and are constantly at the mercy of the elements. Any change to make them greener will have to be paid for and be driven from wealthier countries and it makes more sense, environmentally, to spend that money on those wealthier countries where it can go further to reduce more emissions.

Prices for most things would be (much, much) more expensive in Tuvalu than Mississippi, pretty much everything has to be imported at very small scale and high cost and if it's remotely affordable it's because of aid from countries like New Zealand and Australia subsidising it.

I remember when Cuil launched about 10 years ago they suggested that 1% of the search market was worth a billion dollars so it's big money if you can get inroads. Of course search is probably less important now than it was back then, with discovery happening on social media more and more, but the internet as a whole is much larger than 10 years ago so I wouldn't be surprised if 1% is worth more now days.

Then you have consumers feeling ripped off when the next batch arrives, as has said above they could be trying to build brand loyalty.

Nice, I'll have to check it out.

I must admit I didn't realise Valve had WINE integration into Steam. When I used to do it I had to have a separate steam client which ran under WINE.

Basically I don't have the time to tinker anymore, I want things to work and I don't want to violate licensing agreements.

I'm talking AAA games available on steam without having to run something like WINE.

I like games with strong immersion and narrative and on Linux that's restricted to Alien Isolation, the BioShock series, the Metro series, etc. and that's something which is rare on Linux unfortunately.

I, like many Linux users, have a windows boot partition just for games and the few Windows applications that I can't get on Linux I'd rather not have to do it but it is what it is.

You say that but while there's a few good games but not that many and if you talk to anyone that games on Linux I guaranty you that we all own all those games.

Isn't that what Eucalyptus was supposed to be?

It's quite common for people to die within months of retiring, even if they retire healthy. It's down to a lack of purpose.

Rocket lab though uses less metal and has carbon fibre chassis, fuel tanks, etc. They 3d print their engines which is the main metal part of the ship.

The constraint may be in autoclaves as carbon fibre is a more intensive product to make than just 3d printing or bending metal.

There's quite a few competitors in the narrow body space like the 737: Airbus, Bombadier, Embraer, Irkut, COMAC, etc. The lack of competition is in wide body aircraft (With Airbus and Boeing being the only players although there will be the Craic at some point in the next couple of years).

The other thing that happened was the separation between the defence and civilian parts of the business was removed. The defence part of the organisation was used to a lower standard of rigor and was used to delivering products which weren't up to quality standards because of the close relationship that the vendor and customer has in the military and the long timelines and large budgets for maintenance, etc.

It's open source, there's nothing stopping you from integrating it with the payment platform of your choice and contributing the code back to the project.

Surely democracy is an incentive to improve.

I'd imagine in most developed countries you can do everything online. In New Zealand over the last year I've renewed my passport, setup a company, renewed my drivers license, re-registered my car, opened a business bank account, renewed my mortgage, handled my taxes, etc. All online. The only thing that you can do online in Estonia which I can't do here that I can think of is vote.

Of course NZ is usually ranked as either 1 or 2 on the "ease of doing business" rankings and has low levels of bureaucracy so that might not be typical but I'm also a UK citizen and I renewed my passport from NZ online with no fuss.

No, I didn't say that. I meant there was a lot of work pushed on the people by a ruthless government.

I don't doubt it. It was a rapid modernisation and raising of living standards.

Because communism accelerated development and living standards. A lot of the infrastructure is a legacy of this.

That's a good point, after WW2 the Soviet Union had the double problem of a rapidly urbanising population and having to rebuild all the destruction. They needed a quick solution and what they chose worked.

I've stayed in them several times, they're great. They're incredibly warm in winter and central heated, they're in park like areas with playgrounds and schools in between them.

For the climate of Russia apartments are good solutions, and having them set in clusters with excellent public transport links and their own set of services it's actually superior to a lot of western suburbs where kids can no longer walk to school because of the distances and dangers and have no playgrounds or limited family facilities.

It depends on where you get the doors from, you could probably get used ones from building recyclers or ebay for very little.

That's the marble machine X, the marble machine was the first iteration and was built and performed in a video a few years ago. It was unreliable and couldn't be disassembled to perform with outside of a studio hence the new project.

Yeah, there's definitely good Noir work in films and TV. It's a bit easier there because you can invoke the mood easier in a visual medium even if the dialogue or characters don't reflect the genre as much.

Thanks for that, I haven't read the Berlin Noir "trilogy" will put it on my reading list.

Kind of a mixture I suppose.

I liked it at the time, but haven't seen it for a while. It's more of a homage and consciously embraces the tropes and cliches which is a subtle difference to a work that's just in the genre.

I think it's pretty hard to write a hardboiled style noir now days without it feeling derivative. The tropes are now cliches and the dialogue can be cumbersome and hokey.

A lot of time it feels like someone imitating noir rather than innovating with the genre and that's sad.

You can undoubtedly do it and I'd love to see some examples of a great modern noir to read.

Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of passengers waiting for and riding in vehicles.

The "data heavy" businesses often have the ability to cache their data in CDNs. Uber's data is realtime and dynamic, you scale that the hard way.