60 karma · joined October 27, 2011
So I was really hoping this this thread would have revealed some newer commercial GUI-based alternatives(on-premise, not SaaS). Because I dont really ever want to go back the maintenance hell of hand rolled robots ever again :)
A 2 second google search for kidspass uk shows a sitelink for their "Contact Us" page, listing both a phone number and email address: https://www.kidspass.co.uk/contact-us
So unless that page was added post-incident, then IMO both Alex and Troy did not do responsible disclosure.
With all the computing power and vision AI available in such a vehicle, it seems like it would be possible to perform an automated interior scan of the cabin after each ride. Detecting cleanliness issues(and forgotten baggage).
At my work we use IIS for our main website, but I've been asked to setup and configure a few wordpress installations. I've played around with both nginx and apache, but it was much easier to find clear instructions to setup wordpress on apache, so thats what I went with. I also really like apaches .htaccess support. Easy to lock down access to wp-admin by just dropping a .htaccess file in there restricting access to local ip range, instead of having to pollute the nginx config file with that sort of thing.
For most sites I use keyboard shortcuts + the autocomplete in chrome. Aka to visit hackernews: Ctrl+L and then "news.y" and hit enter.
I have on occassion bought Acer PCs for non-devs at the office, and have regretted it every time. Sure they are cheap, but they also break down very fast and/or have lousy driver support, its just not worth the hassle. I still remember the stationary Acer PC I buy for one of our salesguys. Everytime he went above 50% CPU usage it sounded like a vacuum cleaner, and could be heard from the hallways.
But I also see alot of people running windows on macbooks. So I guess that could work too.
The momentum/community behind elasticsearch seems to be building rapidly(to get an idea, just follow the "This week in Elasticsearch" posts on http://www.elasticsearch.org/blog).
Having said that, solr have been rock solid for us so we have no real pressing need to switch. Also we dont really have the problem(massive scaling) that elasticsearch seems to be built to handle, we just have 15 mio pageviews or so pr month. Our setup is 1 solr master, and 5 solr slaves(one on each of our 5 webservers). And do nightly dataimports from our SQL server database. That last part is indeed where I think solr currently have a nice advantage over elasticsearch. The solr dataimporthandler is really nice if your primary datastore is a SQL server, and allows you to do all sorts of nifty javascript and other transforms on the data in-flight as you stream it from your SQL server. For elastichsearch there is a jdbc-river thingy that sorta lets you do the same, but it isnt as polished or usable as the solr dataimporthandler(IMO). And if you want to install it you have to do it via a plugin link that points to a bit.ly address.. which makes me feel uneasy.
I also like that solr comes with an admin GUI out of the box. There exist some ES equivalent plugins(mobz/elasticsearch-head), but like with the jdbc river its a thirdparty plugin and I guess you have to trust that it doesnt screw with your server. With solr all you need comes with the distribution, so you dont need to spend mental energy on wether or not you can trust this or that plugin to run on your server.
Also the .NET client for ES seems very polished and more sexy than the solr equivalent.
Anyway my non-scientific gut feeling is that with the current momentum behind ES, it will over time be a better choice than solr. But unless you really need to scale massively, plain old solr is available and works just fine. And seems to me to be somewhat easier to get running than ES(but then again I'm probably biased after having run solr a long time).
I dont have enough packt titles to evaluate their general quality, but at least I found their early solr books useful(it was also the only book on solr back then, so not much choice :)
However for those of us that use our computers 8 hours+ every day, I think it makes good sense to upgrade to the newest hardware every 2-3 years.
I just assembled a computer from new parts myself, and its nice now to have a fully encrypted workstation, with zero performance hit. Q87 motherboard with TPM(asus q87m-e) + UEFI bios + UEFI GOP Compliant videocard(EVGA GeForce GTX 770) + M500 SSD + Bitlocker + Win2012R2(or Win8.1) means you can enable the builtin hardware encryption of the M500 SSDs. It gives me a certain peace of mind to know that a burglar wont be able to grab my personal files and source code if my computer was ever stolen. I also imagine the TPM+Secure boot combo will make it harder for a rootkit to go unnoticed.
Not to mention the lower idle power usage resulting from the 22nm haswell and 32nm lynx chipset.
My friends at work seems to think I'm crazy for replacing a 2 year old computer :) Although as I pointed out to one of them, he spent more than twice as much on a new mountain bike, and I'm sure i spend alot more time on my computer than he does on his mountain bike ;)