Viewing profile — foohbarbaz

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 …

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 t…

"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 84…

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 head…

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 poi…

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 …

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 …

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…

"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 i…

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 "M…

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 go…

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 cont…

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…

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 …

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 a…

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 t…

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…

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 h…

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 …

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 writ…

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…

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 writte…