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> She asked how she could download wallpapers, we introduced her to torrents and file sharing

But... why?


Ever been to those "super-awesome-hd-wallaper.com" websites? They are FILLED with ads, popups, etc.

Instead, you can safely download one of the top wallpaper torrent package on Pirate Bay and get thousands of good quality wallpapers.


I find it a bit ironic that 4chan's /wg/ of all places seems like the safest choice here. Plus, the content is always up-to-date


wallbase.cc used to be an archive that scraped the various wallpaper boards on the chans, it worked brilliantly with colour searching, tagging and they had a fantastic supply of dual/triple monitor papers.


There's alpha.wallhaven.cc now but it's nowhere as good as wallbase used to be.


now that looks like something that can be a nice side-project. Thanks for the great idea!


Or ya know... Google Images...


Is it that hard for you to accept that people use different tools to accomplish the same task?


It's a little bizarre to introduce someone to torrents when you can use google images. Especially someone who is struggling to grasp computing as a whole.


Psst... Didn't want to focus the discussion on the legality of torrenting. Of course she uses torrent for more than only wallpapers. ;)


That review is from May, so it's for last year's version. This years has an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card.

Although I expect the battery life to still not be up to the MBP level.


I know I have :)


I don't think it'll be "any day", from what I've heard online it's more likely to be Q1/Q2 2017.


A lot of the bigger sites are very slow from Brazil today :( And SP is also suffering from a lack of power in some areas. Happy Friday!


yeah, i thought it was my internet but it seems like a ton of people are having slow internet issues.


What did you replace redis-rb with, if you don't mind me asking?


In this case we first moved to JRuby (after verifying a similar performance profile to MRI) and once on JRuby we used jedis [1]. I simplified the tale a bit -- apologies if I got your hopes up on MRI.

[1] -- https://github.com/xetorthio/jedis


Commodore 64, using Commodore BASIC - I was around 9 or 10 years old IIRC (which I don't!)


I use Mac OS X FileVault2, with a firmware password. It's incredibly easy to set up and should be good enough to protect my data from the majority of thieves.

Coupled with encrypted Time Machine backups and Arq[0] I feel relatively ok about losing my machine.

[0] https://www.arqbackup.com


Just so you're aware, the firmware password on a Mac can easily be bypassed by anyone with an SPI writer. [1] Using a teensy and a chip clip, someone can clear the password or bypass the password check completely.

So, it will keep the honest out, but for someone who knows what they're doing, it will only prove a mild inconvenience.

This obviously doesn't help them bypass FDE, but in case they want to steal the laptop and not have a brick, the SPI writer works a treat.

[1] https://trmm.net/SPI_flash


FDE is not supposed to be an anti-stealing mechanism anyway.

Besides any potential thief wont even know whether you're running FDE or not on the laptop they steal, or whether it would be bricked or not. They can always sell it for its parts (screen, etc) anyway.


It actually is a mechanism to reduce impact of theft. Someone with access to your computing hardware might modify it to subvert the system, read keystrokes, decrypt drive, leak it, and so on. This can be as simple as Customs installing something as you leave the country during an "inspection" then reading keys right off when you come back. Not saying it happens so much as a concern we had during a brainstorm. Or someone plugging in an attack tool into your Firewire port while you take a piss at Starbucks. Or you plug in USB drive they dropped with a radio and attack kit in its connector.

Whereas, if someone straight-up steals it, they have no chance of recovering data if the encryption is strong and key isn't in memory (eg cold boot). You can also transmit media through untrusted channels that way. Even NSA's Inline Media Encryptor, which my inspired my designs, has that use case.


>It actually is a mechanism to reduce impact of theft.

Sure, but that's different from anti-stealing (and I mean stealing the machine of course, not the data).


I did not know that, but at least they can't get my data. The machine is costly, but my work is much more so!


I use FileVault too on the laptop and it's fine. On the desktop it bogles the Blutooth (el capitan) and related devices (keyboard/mouse) which is VERY annoying.


Thx. I am a relatively new Mac user and didn't realize this existed. Will try this. Any weird issues or edge cases to consider before turning this on ?


Yes. FileVault is awesome, but if your encrypted filesystem ever gets corrupted (which can and does happen), your encrypted data is useless and your volume is toast until it's wiped and re-imaged. Surprisingly I have never had this happen, but more than one friend has reported losing their data due to FS corruption with FileVault enabled. I suppose it can be mitigated with a solid Time Machine/backup routine.


Yep, happened to me and I've never used FileVault again.

I had a TimeMachine backup too but hadn't synced recently and ended up doing a bunch of hackery to recover the un-synced data :(

I much prefer 2FA & revocable certificates on remote accounts so I'm not worried about unauthorized access, and anything else important is encrypted independently.


I have used FileVault since it was released many many years ago. In the beginning there was a fairly severe performance penalty, but it's solid now. I highly recommend using it. On an SSD, at least, but spinning disks + FileVault is border line unusable IMO.


+1 for Arq


"I feel relatively ok about losing my machine." Does that mean you'd feel enthusiastic about donating it? :)


I'm interested


It seems naming things is still one of the hard things in Comp Sci: http://rack.github.io


> It seems naming things is still one of the hard things in Comp Sci: http://rack.github.io

I think rack is a pretty good name for something that is meant to be the infrastructure for running services. Not sure of the etymology for this project, but to me it conveys images of a server rack in a datacenter.


It's not a bad name. The point is it's a name of a very well established, years old open source project used as the near-universal interface points between web servers and Ruby web frameworks.


It is also the name for physical pieces of metal in which you place servers to store them while they are online.

I don't see a problem with two items have the same name provided the functionality they provide is substantially different. Nobody is going to get confused over whether they are referring to the PaaS application or a Ruby library in everyday conversation.


Where do you draw the line? I find using the same term just barely acceptable right now. If ruby was as hot as it was three years ago, maybe I wouldn't. http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-rails-q-ruby.html?relative...


Wow three whole years ago? Pack it up ladies and gentlemen we're heading to the Ruby funeral. Sorry for the snark, but tens of thousands of developers are using the real Rack every day. It's a mature component in widely used web frameworks.

Next up a JavaScript framework called Rake because who uses Ruby anymore.


We picked Rack because we like the conceptual analogy. The naming conflict is unfortunate but there are a limited set of good words available. We hope that context will make the meaning clear.

Thank you for commenting :)


3 years is a life time in web dev.

More importantly, who cares? It was a common 4 letter word used to describe an item that holds stuff a hell of a long time before it was a Ruby thing.

Ruby programmers are a... dedicated bunch.


Those spikes are curious, so let's add a couple of other languages:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-rails-q-ruby-q-javascript-...

Seems like this is likely to reflect something other than changes in language popularity. Frankly the data doesn't seem very interesting without correcting for other factors such as total volume of jobs.

Overall, Ruby looks pretty much as popular today as 3 years ago to me from that data, though perhaps with Rails in a downwards trend (awesome - I love Ruby, but finding Ruby work that doesn't imply Rails is harder, and I don't like Rails).

But it's besides the point anyway. I simply explained why someone mentioned Rack, I don't particularly care either way (probably because I don't really care about Convox Rack - I'd never use a single vendor solution like this, and haven't exactly hidden how overpriced I find AWS in past comments).


Companies too... Rackspace comes to mind.


Rackspace also has a CLI tool called rack


That's exactly the etymology. We were thinking about datacenters and servers. The original name was convox/kernel, but we thought it wasn't very descriptive.

The naming collision with the Ruby interface is unfortunate, but we figured it was pretty easy to tell them apart from context.


Tbh I agree that as a descriptive name it works quite well.

However, it will muddy the waters for people trying to solve problems in future. For example, this tag on StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/rack


I believe he referencing the fact that a well known technology called 'Rack' already exists.


A datacenter rack is indeed the etymology of the name.

Naming is hard.

"Convox" is the company and platform.

Rack is a project code name but it is a noun you come across when using the platform too. For example the 'convox rack update' command delivers API and infrastructure improvements.


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