vigormortis's comments

It is for me. I've had to disable it on my mbp and ios devices; otherwise DNS lookups choke.

I would recommend Ed Hutchins' "Cognition in the Wild". He examines the performance of the crew of a ship acting as distributed intelligence and the many factors that go into making them an effective unit (or not).

Ed was also part of the UCSD Cognitive Science department at the time of the Vincennes incident and I suspect it was his work, along with Don Norman's, that drew the attention of the Navy. At the time, I was doing an undergraduate independent study in his lab, where we spent hours watching videos of airline pilots in 747 flight simulators, looking out for errors while using the flight guidance system. Our "textbook" was the operations manual for the 747 guidance and autopilot system.

An example of the sort of UI things we were looking for:

"Improvements" such as replacing the analog altimeter and airspeed indicators with digital readouts deprived pilots of operational awareness as they could no longer estimate rate of descent by watching the movement of the hands of the analog meters.

Anyway, here are the links:

This is the introduction and table of contents:

https://hci.ucsd.edu/hutchins/citw.html

Amazon link

https://www.amazon.com/Cognition-Wild-Bradford-Edwin-Hutchin...

> All of these esoteric philosophies ultimately boil down to the worship of ones own will

I'll acknowledge that hermeticism, gnosticism, thelema, etc are not going to be everyone's bag, and that's just fine. However....

That's a rather large overgeneralization of some quite disparate philosophies. Also, you may be working with a mistaken idea of what "will" means in this context. A person's will is (very roughly) their optimal place and trajectory in the world; it is not just following some desire or doing what you want. It is not ego based. Wills harmonize and do not clash. The flip side, and perhaps more importantly, it is wrong to interfere with someone carrying out their own will.

An additional perspective: "Will" is one's personal, bedrock Truth of Self. You exert your Will on yourself, not on others.

Anyway, this isn't quite the negative that you seem to be implying.

You might be confusing the "Book of Lies" with the "Book of the Law". The latter was "channeled" and is the keystone of his system, where the former is authored by Crowley in the usual sense of the term.

Evi Nemeth was Godmother to a couple generations of Unix Sysadmins. The UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook is practical, usefully opinionated, playful, and brilliant, much like its lead author/editor. I've used it as the core text for classes I have taught and it's a great interview study guide for systems folk.

If you really want a trip down memory lane, dig up some earlier editions and learn how to deal with the quirks of the SGI, DEC, SUN, IBM, & HP menagerie.

I'd definitely start with this one.

Back in the early 2000's I was the networking lead for a start-up managed services company. We made heavy use of Extreme Networks switches at the time. Though our experience with the hardware was largely positive, we did have a batch of rack switches that were consistently flakey, so we took them out of service and stacked them in a closet awaiting RMA. As we had the the unfortunate timing of starting business shortly before the dot.com implosion, the company didn't stay afloat for long and I jumped ship.

Fast forward 18 months and I found myself working as a systems engineer for a Pharmacy Benefits provider. I was not part of the networking team, but the networking lead approached me to help troubleshoot some pernicious network stability issues for their POS systems. They were also an Extreme Networks shop, so they they figured I might have some insight. The networking lead tried to set me up with access to the switches and was confused when I appeared to already have an account provisioned. Once I connected and began looking at the switch logs, I had simultaneous deja vu and "are you kidding me???" reactions. These were the very same switches I had personally configured and later scrapped during my previous gig. Apparently my new employer had bought the switches during a fire sale and put them into production with little to no configuration and they were just insanely lucky that their ip ranges and vlans overlapped what I had previously used.

I didn't stay very long at this company. Thankfully the haunted switches didn't follow me to my next job.

Check out Pohl Anderson's "Tau Zero" which examines precisely this scenario. A starship using bussard ramjet needs to find an "empty" section of space free of interstellar hydrogen so they can fix their engines and decelerate without getting fried. This requires them to continue accelerating so that time dilation effects will allow the trip within the crew's lifetime. That's the setup, not the plot.

Also, ballistic missile subs don't really matter unless you're planning to throw nukes at someone, in which case the makeup of surface fleets quickly becomes irrelevant.

Ships afloat does not mean they're operational or combat effective. Some of those ships are quite old and are badly in need of replacement or upgrades. Many of them are under crewed. The numbers of ships are a starting point, but really don't tell much of the story.

None of Germany's 6 subs were operational at the beginning of last year. That may have changed since, but the underlying reasons, poor planning and lack of spare parts, are still there. Only 9 of 15 Frigates were operational and the lead of their new class of frigates, the F125, failed sea trials. The Navy subsequently refused to commission the ship. Admittedly, these are not necessarily crew training issues, but crews without operational ships are not likely to maintain a desirable level of combat readiness. These issues aren't just limited to the Navy; ground forces are also in a bad state.

France and the UK are in better shape, but the Royal Navy in particular has holes in its capabilities where the US Navy is expected to fill in. They're regaining some capabilities with their new (and only operational) carrier, but it's not even clear if it has a functional air wing yet as the F-35B's they purchased only began carrier operations this past September. Another carrier is under construction, but it may be awhile before their carrier based naval aviation becomes combat effective.

The remaining European Navies are pretty small and pretty limited in what they can do. They tend to focus on ASW with some surface warfare capabilities, but are again dependent upon one of the larger Navies for air defense.

Japan may well be the most combat effective of the bunch, but that's a completely different theater of operations.

This isn't intended to be a rah-rah, USA forever sort of rant. Everyone, including the US, seem to have let things slip to the extent that combat effectiveness is becoming questionable.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/germanys-navy-dead-26...

https://www.dw.com/en/no-more-missions-for-germanys-navy-war...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/20/german-armed-for...

> It's a good thing the US is still friendly with Europe. Everything I've read about their (admittedly much smaller) navies is that they're far more professional and better run, ....

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

Norway managed to sink one of their own frigates.

https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2018/11/13/norwegia...

Germany doesn't have anything left to sink.

https://www.rt.com/news/418484-german-navy-ships-shortage/