First, a credit card is a vehicle for purchasing things you don't need at prices you can't afford with money you don't have. I know that some people use cards responsible (there have been several examples in this thread), but most do not. It is too easy to use.

Second, most people confuse needs and wants. They want things and think that they need them. I know from experience. At one time, I was over $40,00 in consumer debt, not including car or housing. It took a long time, and there were many things I did not buy that helped me get out of debt.

I teach a personal finance class and have taught it for over two years. There are people that need help to get out of debt, but 99% of the people I taught could get out of debt on their own. All they had to do was to want to get out of debt more than they wanted some of the things they used to buy.

The idea that people have to use credit cards and stay in debt is either ignorance because they don't know how to get out of debt, or an out right lie told by people that have an "interest" in collecting interest.

I will share a couple of principles and steps anyone can take to get out of debt.

1. You can't fix your finances until you REALLY know what your finances are.

For one month, write down EVERYTHING you spend. You don't need to show it to anyone, but keep track of every single cent. If you buy a drink, write it down. You will be very surprised at where some of your money goes.

2. If you don't plan where your money will go, it will still go somewhere. Just not where you want it to go.

Make a budget. Stick to the budget.

There are more principles and actions that can be taken. These principles are not secret. I have seen this work for people making less that $20,000 per year. And I have seen it work for people making over $100,000. If someone wants to stop losing money to high interest from credit cards, they can. It is not easy. I have also seen people that wouldn't put the effort into it, or couldn't give up the $4 drink three times a day. But it CAN be done.

And it is NOT luck. It is work.

Yes, emergencies do happen. And you can't really plan for them. But you CAN budget for them.

I recommend a 1-month emergency fund. This is a savings with enough money to survive and pay all monthly bills for one month if all income stopped. The purpose of this fund is not about losing income. That is just the amount needed. The purpose is to have money for unexpected expenses.

For example, recently I had an appliance break. Rather than put it on a card, I withdrew money from my emergency fund to pay for the new appliance. I then spent a couple of months building my emergency fund back to the needed level.

To build up this fund did require effort. And I may not have bought everything I wanted, but I did get things I needed, and when an emergency happened, I had the money.

At one time I had hopes.

Now I have h-o-p-e-s.

(In other words, my hopes were dashed. Or I now have dashed hopes.)
([included for the humor impared])

Sorry, that title goes to Symantec. They have acquired 57 companies in their time, including Veritas, Altiris, NitroDesk and more. Some of them still live, but many of them are just memories now.

Of course Symantec sold a lot of its business to Broadcom, so maybe Broadcom is a contender. As is Microsoft with its EEE policy. (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish)

In open source, there is also OVirt. It was the basis for Red Hat Virtualization. It includes moving a running vm from one physical machine to another, SAN support, CPU pinning, snapshots, user and role based authorizations and more.

It is too bad that Red Hat is dropping virtualization. We have been using them for years. Admittedly, we only have 17 hypervisors and have had between 200-300 VM's. But the open source upstream is still going, and Oracle is now using Ovirt for its virtualization. (I hate recommending Oracle because of their history of changing licensing and then claiming you owe $$$$ for years that you used something they originally told you was free. But the fact that they are using it probably means that it will be around for a while.)

I have heard that Proxmox is not quite ready for Enterprise, but that may have changed recently. I have heard good things about Nutanix, although I do not know about the costs.

To elaborate just a little, when Windows was first introduced, it was designed as a single user OS. If you were at the keyboard, you were the administrator with rights to all functions, including both user space and kernel space. As it grew, multi-user was an add-on, but each user still had admin rights. This made virus writing very, very easy. If you could access the machine, you could access kernel space. Later, UAC was added, but it is still bolted on. There are many ways around it, and different kinds of malware take advantage of it.

Linux and BSD (as well as most flavors of UNIX) were designed differently. Multi-user was built in from the beginning. Users cannot access kernel space. They cannot change info in the home directory of other users. In order to effectively change kernel space, you have to be root. This is why on Linux machines, you need root access in order to add a printer. Printer drivers access kernel space.

On reasonably administrated Linux system, there is no such thing as remote root access. in fact, with SELinux or AppArmor, even if you got remote root access through a web vulnerability, the root account can't even change configuration files, much less access kernel space. This is one reason why a virus is so hard to write for Linux. There is no default way for a remote user to access the kernel space and affect the entire machine.

Do vulnerabilities exist? Yes. With good patching, this avenue can be blocked.

Does malware exist for Linux? Yes. but it has to find a way in. Often this is through a package vulnerability, or through phishing to convince a user to run a malicious program as root. This is one reason why allowing remote root, even with a strong password, is a very bad idea.

What about Android? Isn't that Linux? Why are there viruses for Android? In order to make things more convenient for the average user, certain security functions were relaxed. Including the ability for a user to install malware. Many Android phones run without an AV solution as long as the user is careful about what programs are installed, and what links are clicked on.

Technically it is neither.

They copied the code from Dracula (a very popular dark theme), added an "exploit" (non-malicious, but could have been) and published it as "Darcula" and watched how many people downloaded it.

The researchers also created a custom tool to check out the extensions available in VSCode Studio.

Through this process, they have found the following:

        1,283 with known malicious code (229 million installs).
        8,161 communicating with hardcoded IP addresses.
        1,452 running unknown executables.
        2,304 that are using another publisher's Github repo, indicating they are a copycat.

They included a copy of the code found in one extension that opens a reverse shell.

The problem seems to be that MS doesn't want to do anything about it.

Red Hat - We make Microsoft look good and Oracle look cheap!!! Deprecating software by removing one useful feature at a time.

Many people do not realize that part of those fees involve the risk of the card company. Because of this, the rates and fees are actually different by industry.

For example, at a retail store, you pay for product before you receive the product. If the card is declined, no product is received. (In an ideal situation, of course.)

But there are industries where you pay after you receive the product or services. A few examples include pay-at-pump gas stations, car rentals and hotels. In these cases, an estimated charge is sent, asking if the customer has funds available, but the completing transaction doesn't happen until after the product or services have been received. In some cases it is only minutes, but others could be as long as weeks after the initial request was made that actual charge is completed. As such, the fees charged to them are higher than fees charged to a grocery store or a retail establishment.

Are the charges too high? Obviously.

Are the rate and fees schedules simple enough to make a percentage cut across the board? No.

For those not familiar, in Australia, "root" does not mean cheer. It gives new meaning to the song, "Take me out the ball game."

(Google it if you are really curious.)

You can blame Arizona for short winters. This year it was on a Monday.

One way to think of addiction is: Short Term Gratification, Long Term Destruction.

For some people the instant gratification of drugs, alcohol, tobacco or gambling overwhelms the knowledge of the destructive nature. They know that they are destroying themselves, but NEED to have that "fix."

If you have never had to deal with that, be grateful. Just because you haven't experienced it, doesn't mean that it isn't real.

There are two errata that supply the broken grub2/shim packages. One for RHEL 7 and the other for RHEL 8.

RHSA-2020:3216 for RHEL 7 includes grub2, shim and fwupd.

RHSA-2020:3217 for RHEL 8 includes grub2, shim, mokutil, and fwupdate

Because America doesn't want them. They may think that they want them, but their actions show otherwise.

Over the last 4 or 5 elections, there have been several good candidates, most of which do not make it through the primaries. Good candidates are dragged through the mud over a misinterpreted remark or an action from their youth. Often the candidate that is elected had said or done worse things than the one that was rejected. "< #1 > said a bad thing about < group > . < #2 > both said many bad things and treats < group > like dirt. Let's elect < #2 > ."

Part of the problem seems to be that many Americans are lazy and not willing to investigate who would be a better candidate. "I am going to vote my gut reaction/my party. The other candidate MUST be bad." Another problem is that any successful politician is one who HAS to lie. No honest politician, or even partly honest politician (since honest politician is a contradiction of terms), has a chance to make it. People are too willing to listen to political ads, or slanted news articles.

Another problem is that many people have lost the ability to think about what would be best for the country as apposed to what would be best for them. We are both too greedy and too selfish. Some greed and selfishness is good, but we no longer know where the line is, or are not willing to keep from stepping over that line when we do know where it is.

There are many more issues, but we have shown with our votes that we don't really want a good president.

< /end rant >

Good Point. Looking at the 2015 number, AZCentral estimated that all the Phx Area golf courses used 80 Million Gallons per day. With over 200 golf courses in the area, it averages out to about 250,000 gallons per day for each course.

That means that the Google data center will use between 4 and 16 golf courses of water each day.

Pool usage, however, is a much lower number. It is found that each pool uses about 15 gallons per day. That means that it takes about 16,000 pools to equal 1 golf course, or 67,000 to 267,000 pools to equal 1 data center of water usage.