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 atrocious. On Linux the API (libusb) quite a bit nicer, but still a bit of work.

The plug and play part, device naming and unique identifiers are a special "joy" of USB.

If serial port is sufficiently fast I'll take it any day over USB.

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 that regard. I would not be surpised if allegations were true. A bunch if primadonna devs can be nasty to work with. Just stay away and separate work and life.

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 84mph (speed limit being 75) and go from relatively bright lit area into a dark and a curve. A second of blindness inevitably follows.

Still, I would probably rather just have a higher divider between lanes in different directions, so that high beams can be just used most of the time.

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 headlights having to step on brakes abruptly for not being able to tell which way the road ahead curves used to happen periodically.

Over the mountain passes in spring where the lane markings get worn down sometimes you just can't see anything w/o high beams (and risking to blind the oncoming traffic).

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 point of a wholesale update, as opposed to what is described? What I mean is running specific set of services (which most often built from source anyway) and keeping those services up to date.

What you get in return is both stability and security, since you don't wait for vendor to release a patch and actually understand what the vulnerability is.

With wholesale patching, in fact, you can never be sure whether your system is secure with respect to all published vulnerabilities.

Another interesting detail is, that with services running built from sources often you end up with vulnerabilities not applicable to your configuration.

Oftentimes, you can just tweak the config instead of changing code (and potentially breaking running things).

Software updates is just a cop out for people that are too lazy to pay attention to security.

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 installed over your specific OS configuration).

You only patch what you need to patch. Most of the time for every production service you end up building a custom version anyway. Patching does no good to those.

So, by patching you only bring potential harm and overhead of going through change control processes.

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 a patch. If there's a hole, read the report, determine whether your config/build is vulnerable, rebuild.

Why would want to patch something you are not running or use?

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 do it no good. Why would I wait for vendor to release a patch? If a service is external, I will watch out for vulnerabilities and rebuild ASAP before any patches are out. Besides, 90% of the time my custom build is not even vulnerable to a particular problem.

If I am NOT running a service, why would I care about patches for it?

Why would I wholesale patch a server anyway? If somebody breaks in and gets a local shell, all is lost anyway. If they are not in, they are dealing with externally facing services only, see above. There are specific and counted number of daemons on every machine.

This whole patch-update thing is misguided and for people that want assurances and no responsibility.

"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 is over. Likely will never buy again.

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 "Microsoft-Java". Either learn Java, or better yet start with Python.

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 good idea.

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 contact or smile either also take some getting used to now.

It's cultural, but Russia is a harsh place, so it goes deeper.

The part about people in the street not being helpful to each other is also true.

Just watch those dash cam videos where people witness a horrible crash, drive around and keep moving. You can die in the street and nobody might care. It's cultural and it's not a good thing.

The mob mentality is also a lot stronger. Westerners are a lot more tolerant to people being different or choosing their own way. It is in fact encouraged to be different and individual. Russians on the other hand, have whole layers of culture dedicated to making sure everybody is not sticking out of the crowd and not being an individual.

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 a single red or yellow article of clothing, all black. I don't have any non-black puffy jackets either and I am a... Russian :)