10:30 – More administrative stuff today and tomorrow. Monday, I start on building more chemical bags and other subassemblies for science kits, as well as getting shelves up in my office and the unfinished basement area and getting my new desktop system set up and configured. Barbara’s been doing yeoman duty upstairs, getting stuff moved in, unboxed, and organized, as well as getting the garage cleared and organized. We’re making progress. We’re entering the slowest period of the year for science kit sales, which gives us time to focus on the other stuff that needs to be done.
My voter registration card came the other day, and I’m debating what to do. I’ll vote in the state and local primaries this spring and the general election in November, but I’m not sure about the federal level races. I’m halfway inclined to write in none of the above for each of them, but I may vote for Cruz in the primary and the Republican presidential candidate in the November election. Whoever that might be must be better than whoever the Democrats run. I’m really inclined to vote for the Libertarian candidates in all races, of course, but they have no chance of being elected except perhaps at the local level. And I’m not fool enough to think that it ultimately makes any difference who’s in office. They’re all bad.
Barbara baked a pan of cornbread yesterday, which turned out very well. Today, she’s baking regular bread and a batch of oatmeal cookies.
“Whoever that might be must be better than whoever the Democrats run.”
Doubtful.
“They’re all bad.”
Indeed. And some of them are evil.
It will be an interesting year. Lines are being drawn. But if it does eventually come to another civil war of sorts, it won’t be like the events of 1860-65; more like Yugoslavia. The two basic, most fundamental sides, which I guess I could call the new Murkans and the old Murkans, are mostly all smushed together with some concentrations of each in certain areas. So your next-door neighbor on one side is a flaming SJW Prog type and on the other side an Oathkeeper family. This could get messy.
And it’s probably just gonna drag on for years, simmering, barring any “perfect storm” events that ignite the powder keg. Life will be uglier and more unpleasant and less civil than it already is here. Eyes and ears. Condition Yellow all the time, at least, and increasing use of Condition Orange.
Have a nice day.
Well, at least there don’t seem to be many if any SJW/Prog types in this area. But, yeah, things could get interesting in the old Chinese curse sense.
This leads to this and this.
Nice little progression of cause-and-effect there, Mr. SteveF. The attacking groups are playing right into the hands of the commie sons of bitches who rule Europe from Brussels and Bonn: this will increase “national security” concerns and more repression from state LE and armed forces, which most derps will applaud of course, just as they would here. Also, the attackers are picking on the wrong targets; bombing and shooting “migrants” will allow the media to show the heartbreaking pictures of female and child corpses and tar all attackers with the Nazi brush. Attackers should be attacking the bureaucrats and politicians over there, make them feel the pain.
Take those two laughing hyena commie bastards and shove grenades down their throats.
When the Camp of the Saints “migrants” really start piling into this country and committing Cologne-style attacks, there’s gonna be a shitstorm of hostile and violent reaction to make the Euros look like utter pansies. But again, the attackers will pick on the wrong targets, instead of going after the government and media enablers and instigators and apologists.
“Personal computers approach retirement age”
http://www.cringely.com/2016/01/30/the-personal-computer-approaches-retirement-age/
“I am pretty sure the PC is going away. And I have figured out why.”
I must admit, I am worried about this also. But, I see no way to do serious work on a smartphone.
Cringely has predicted 6 of the last 0 extinctions of the desktop PC.
I think my smartphone is really cool, but I also can’t see a way to use it for serious work. I need a screen and keyboard for serious work. A mouse is also very high on the list for me. I think it’s incredibly cool though that a $35 Raspberry Pi Model 2 is approaching the usability point. If anything it’s less powerful than my cell phone but has I/O capabilities my smart phone doesn’t.
I think extinction of the PC is unlikely, but that smaller devices are an exploding market while the PC clearly isn’t. I’ve seriously considered the idea of my next PC being a laptop. That doesn’t mean retiring my current desktop. I could see people who aren’t techie nerds happy with only Android devices like an nVidia Shield, a tablet and a smartphone.
I likes my big-screen deskstops and use them more than the laptops and tablets and smartypants phone. Fah more. But that’s just me, an old, over-the-hill fossil and general reprobate.
I also like playing with the RaspberryPI’s and can find all sorts of uses for them, ditto, to a lesser extent, with the Arduino’s.
I think extinction of the PC is unlikely, but that smaller devices are an exploding market while the PC clearly isn’t.
Yup, in today’s harsh business environment, if you aren’t growing, you are dying. The number of PCs being sold is dropping at 2 to 3 percent per quarter and has been for a couple of years.
Many people could suffice with a tablet or phone. Most of us here could not but we mostly all have phones and tablets. I’m not a big fan of tablets but I do have a decent sized phone (Moto Turbo Max). Good for being the device you always have. For my work I really need a laptop or desktop. Age makes large screens preferable. I prefer a mouse to a touch screen or mushpad. So being in my home office I have two desktops. I have a 17″ Toshiba laptop that’s wonderful to use and view. Full key board and I have a small wireless mouse I use. It’s big and somewhat heavy. Put a 250GB SSD in last year. Nice speed boost.
But the one I use out in the field the most now is a Chromebook I bought in June 14. Small, light, fast and long battery life. Also added a small wireless mouse. Do need wifi to be most useful but I can kick my cell phone to hotspot when needed. Could easily be a desktop as it has HDMI and USB 3. When I need Windows I just RDP to my desktop or any number of servers I support. Yes it’s a small 10″ screen but I do fine with 1.25 readers. You can cast to large screens too or use the HDMI.
I can see a lot of business desktops moving to a small dedicated appliance computer. All storage on the local server or the cloud. Welcome back to the dumb terminal. Actually makes the job of us sys admins easier.
I am spoiled by two 20 inch monitors on my desktop. I use my tablet mainly to consume media. Have to use my full size keyboard for writing and responding to posts. Keyboarding on my tablet means I pay more attention to the keying than to what I am writing. I have tried speech to txt but going back to find and correct errors is a pain I don’t need. As an IT security specialist I don’t carry a smart phone, I know just how insecure they all are.
Welcome back to the dumb terminal. Actually makes the job of us sys admins easier.
You would not believe the problems that I am running into because of this. And yet, the plants and the refineries are turning off all wifi and phone access. So, their laptops have to be able to be able operate with zero internet and cloud access. Most of my customers are re-evaluating their cloud plans right now.
Well sometimes a full unconnected computer is the answer but the trend is definitely towards server(local or remote) run applications with virtual desktops or web interfaces. Certainly reduces the workstation resources needed.
Yep. I have a dumb ol’ flip phone, and the battery stays out unless I’m about to make a call.
Good! Cloud computing always made good sense for the vendors, using their unused capacity. It was always a stupid stupid stupid idea for the users unless their data wasn’t important enough that they didn’t care if it disappeared or was viewed by everyone in the world.
I’ve lost several contracts since about 2012 because I was insufficiently enthusiastic and uncritical about moving company data to the cloud. I’d like to think that the True Believer managers were fired and blacklisted, but I would be shocked if that actually happened. The CxO job title seems to convey personal immunity from the consequences of bad decisions.
A little paranoia is a good thing. Wearing tinfoil hats, not so much.
I’ve seriously considered the idea of my next PC being a laptop.
My Surface Pro 3 would be more than adequate for my desktop use. Add the surface dock (http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Microsoft-Surface-Dock/productID.325725200) and a couple of monitors, USB keyboard, USB mouse and you have just about all you would need. Network connection, four USB ports. With the mouse and keyboard connected you have two ports that can be used for external disk drives and you can still use the one on the Surface if needed.
System is fast with the SSD. Works well as a desktop and a tablet. Disk storage is limited thus the need for external storage if you have a lot of photographs.
Microsoft got it right on this device. And it is even better with the Surface Pro 4 and the Surface book. Some serious competition for the Apple products. If you only do content consumption the iPad is better as it is much lighter. For getting work done the iPad basically sucks and the Surface is much better.
I had a choice between the new Macbook Pro and the Surface. Detachable keyboard put me in the Surface corner. Software licensing for software I already had made it a no-brainer. Would have been expensive, in excess of $500, to acquire new software licenses for the Macbook. Even then I have some software that just won’t run on a Mac unless I use an emulator.
I was insufficiently enthusiastic and uncritical about moving company data to the cloud
I too am not enthusiastic about the cloud. Having gone from mainframe dumb terminals, to smart terminals, back to to dumb terminals, back to smart terminals (PCs) and now the move back to dumb terminals all have had their problems.
I don’t want a cloud application that depends on someone else maintaining the environment. Their butt is not on the line when it goes down. I also don’t trust cloud services to not take a peak at your data, or get your data crossed with someone else’s data.
There is a skool of thought that says it might be worthwhile to continue to carry smartypants phones around, since everyone knows everyone has one, all over the world, and ditto the usual Winblows box at home or laptop with open or half-ass secured wireless connections. So you look like a typical normal north Murkan schlub citizen-subject. If you are being stealthy in other ways at other times and in other places for whatever purposes, then sure, get the right phone, the right laptop or netbook and use the right browsers and network protocols to stay at least gray, if not black.
Someone watching ol’ OFD one way or another simply sees me sitting at home here typing away, or sitting by the stove reading and listening to the radio and throwing logs into the stove. Other than that, I go to the store, church, gas station, dump run, other errands, and that’s about it. Pretty quiet old guy at home, not a problem. Got sports decals on his car. Not a threat.
Oh my; even my suspicious, paranoid tinfoil-hat mind did not see this coming: Cankles, according to some ABC nooz program, has said she would certainly consider appointing Barack Hussein, many blessings be upon his name, to the Supreme Court when she gets in. This, combined with multiple retirements coming up….
…fun times ahead…
Ready for the outlaw life? Or a Homeland Security camp? Or simply knuckling under, doffing your hat and bowing to the masters?
Sounds like a fair trade for avoiding prosecution.
Yeah I’m not ready to only trust the cloud for critical needs. Local servers, local replication and backups. Cloud as backup backup. What are you going to do if you need a 100GB backup off a remote site? Better have a big pipe. No, your own NAS should be the first choice. They’re cheap, get three, spread them around in secure areas for physical safety.
OTH I’ve setup some customer inquiry on hosted servers. Keeps them out of the company network. We just feed CSV files up each day. So far no down time or even access problem.
“Sounds like a fair trade for avoiding prosecution.”
Which is the greater threat, though? Prosecution from local lawyers and judges or home invasions or other attacks from hadji orcs and homegrown scumbags? That’s where we get down to the ‘better tried by twelve than carried by six’ level. And of course the ‘when seconds count…’ bromide.
“No, your own NAS should be the first choice. They’re cheap, get three, spread them around in secure areas for physical safety.”
+1
Only fly in that ointment is PHB manglers enthralled with gassing about cloud and hybrid cloud and they’re all too often completely ignorant about any of it, but love the new buzz words and the sound of their own voices.
“… customer inquiry on hosted servers. Keeps them out of the company network. We just feed CSV files up each day.”
+1 again.
she’s nothin if not a horse trader…
‘course you get it home and discover it’s a mule.
nick
Hillary Bitch Clinton isn’t a half-assed horse trader, she’s a horse’s ass.
LockMart was moving to laptops for almost all when I left. All your data files were on their network, so backups were easy for IT to do. Easy to push fixes to everyone, as there were only a few standard loads. The exceptions were people that did CAD and the like that needed more grunt than a laptop. They used their own cloud system, as using an external vendor over the internet was problematic under ITAR (export control). Their cloud system was certified for use by multiple classified compartments.
When we went on shutdown for a tropical storm, it only took them about 20 hours to push all the data for about 500 people and multiple projects to a data center on the other side of the US. Plus one of the IT guys was going home with a stack of archive tapes.
That’s the key point.
RE Surface or Surface Book. I _had_ a surface pro 3 for a while, until one of the accountants asked for something to take home & work on… So now I have a Surface Book. I like both of them a LOT for picking up and going to do something. I took the surface to a conference and loved the ability to just open it up and work.
That said, I find neither of them are suitable for real work. Desktop with 16 Gigs, 2 monitors, and enough graphics power to run Photoshop and several different CAD programs are essential for me.
Flower Power
I’m thinking of getting a few of these for the next time Greens block a road or something. Sort of like shooting someone with a load of rock salt, but more ironic.
My “fair trade” comment was in regards to Presduhdentures Hillary Bitch Clinton making Obuttsuck one of the Supremes, not to the expected life of formerly free Americans under such a regime.
“My “fair trade” comment was in regards…”
Aha. Warn’t sure, so of course I jumped off the bridge anyway, as is my careless wont. Won’t things be interesting, if and when Cankles gets in, and several ancient justices retire finally, and she can then pack it full up with commie scum, much like the Left’s idol, Pharaoh Roosevelt II. Then they can continue to entwine their personal commie predilections with that birdcage liner formerly known as the U.S. Constitution, which now has about as much genuine substance as the old Soviet one, or those in North Korea and Red China and Cuba.
While the Congress of simian millionaires continue to do nothing at all for us as they rake in more millions, and if anything, betraying the country.
And whichever sock puppet in the WH does the will of the actual rulers and still the masses of Murkan rubes and bumpkins swallow it all, like Linda Lovelace in “Deep Throat.”