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For reliability, I prefer actual data over your anecdotal opinion: Consumer drives shown to be more reliable than enterprise drives.

This probably has more to do with TLER than anything because consumer drives are designed with the expectation they'll be run as a single isolated disk whereas enterprise disks are typically expected to be part of some RAID array running in tandem with other disks the RAID controller can use to correct errors, so while an enterprise and consumer drive might share the same physical hardware the firmware for enterprise drives can differ significantly in the way they handle error recovery.

I work for a very large storage array manufacturer. Warranty length is *not* the only difference...

Agreed. The price is also different.

For reliability, I prefer actual data over your anecdotal opinion: Consumer drives shown to be more reliable than enterprise drives.

Actually, OS X contains code and bugs that date back to the 1970s.

I don't know if this extends to files without DRM, and it sounds like it does not, but Apple is admitting that they deleted files purchased from Real, at least:

http://www.computerworld.com/a...

After two years and nearly $2 billion in losses, Microsoft's Surface turned a profit in the September quarter, the company said Thursday.

October 31, 2014, via the Motley Fool:

The Surface Pro 3, released earlier this year, is selling far better than its predecessors, and for the first time Microsoft has recorded a positive gross profit for the Surface business.

It would do you well to source timely things, sir.

As TFA mentions, IBM just sold its supercomputer division to a Chinese company (Lenovo).

What TFA says is:

IBM's decision to sell its x86 server business to Lenovo will turn the China-based company, in short order, into one of the largest HPC vendors in the world, according to IDC.

"Lenovo may become the number two HPC provider literally by the end of this year," said Earl Joseph, an analyst at IDC. Hewlett-Packard is number one. If not in the second position, Lenovo will be close to it.

The linked article says:

As a result of the deal, Lenovo is receiving a host of IBM products including its System x, BladeCenter and Flex System blade servers and switches, along with its NeXtScale and iDataPlex servers and associated software.

IBM, however, will still hold on to its System z mainframes, Power Systems, Storage Systems, Power-based Flex servers, PureApplication and PureData appliances.

I don't know what "[IBM's] supercomputer division" is, but it's not a division that solely develops and sells x86 servers; they also sell Power Architecture HPC systems.

However, at least in 2012, they spoke of iDataPlex servers for NOAA, so they sold that part of their supercomputer efforts to Lenovo. Whether they'll push for Power Architecture HPC systems for NOAA instead is another matter.

http://www.reddit.com/r/techno...

http://www.computerworld.com/s...

Since I was able to get off a wise ass crack joke for a first post, let me follow it up with something actually insightful for you other readers out there.

What makes a "good" or "bad" boss anyways? Well, this article is one that I've always lived by, and it explains things quite well for both us techies and for those who are not of the tech mindset and skill set.

http://www.computerworld.com/a...

Subscription? To a.... word processor

The geek trying to be clever.

The subscription is for a local install of the full MS Office suite + online storage and other extras; but you knew that already.

Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal alone is currently worth about $500 million a year in revenue to Microsoft. Consumer Office 365 tops a half-billion dollars in annual revenue run-rate

I don't want to do your Googling for you but in 10 seconds I found: http://www.computerworld.com/a...

This article's first line mentions 2bn in losses.

Not the most relevant article but I'm pretty sure you can find your own data from this point.

That would be fantastic. However, the link appears to be created by file:///Users/lucasmearian/, and Lucas Mearian works at ComputerWorld, not HP.

It does speak about the handshake that goes on in the video, before charging takes place: http://www.computerworld.com/a...

Or, it could be, that this is complete nonsense:
http://www.computerworld.com/a...

The entire field had the same bump. It wasn't just women. The percentage of women in the field has never risen above about 35%
I'd argue that's when the field was new and exciting. Then it tapered off and remained stable until the internet bubble... and tapered off again.

I think that, if anything, this shows women are savvy. They saw a new tech, took advantage of it. After the industry became less flashy, and the best jobs were harder to get they moved on. Then when the realities of the industry started to sink in and the industry collapsed they again left.

With robotics becoming more capable all the time even more skilled labor jobs will go away. A prediction is that one in three jobs will be gone by 2025 http://www.computerworld.com/article/2691607/one-in-three-jobs-will-be-taken-by-software-or-robots-by-2025.html and that trend is still ramping up.

What labor-intense industry will technology create? The current arc of innovation is not like that which enabled the move from rural farming to factory farming and sent workers to urban factories and then to work at Starbucks and Wal-Mart.

We'd better get used to a whole lot more socialism, or a whole lot fewer hours worked per week, or some other way to define value for compensation. The current winner-takes-almost-all system will collapse with no employment for the vast majority of humanity.

At least stop awarding them government contracts.

its a I'm smarter than you are therefore I call you whatever I want to

Reminds me of something I read in this article - the bit about Ego resonates especially well with this sentiment.

In 2009, IBM's US workforce was 105,000 out of 399,409 worldwide. (source: IBM stops disclosing U.S. headcount data, Patrick Thibodeau, Computerworld, Mar 12, 2010 6:00 AM PT)

IBM stopped releasing its US headcount in 2010, but I think it's safe to assume the US:World ratio is not much more than the 1:4 it was in 2009.

I think we can all agree that ten million sales last year is better than ten million sales today.

You're right. Last year they had a measly 9 million in sales for the first weekend of the iPhone 5s.

Didn't Bill Gates dismiss this enough saying it is not his phrase, he never said that?
http://www.computerworld.com/a...

Real bug, hypothetical exploit, of course.

I sincerely doubt the exploit was merely hypothetical, but I know for a fact that that's exactly the sort of thinking that leads to real exploits.

Who cares? It was real, not hypothetical.

"Pics or it didn't happen" is a cute saying that has no bearing on reality. Are you from that generation? Any security expert will tell you that an 18 month unpatched hole like the Apple one is, in fact, a huge deal.

Speaking of pics, it's my understanding that more of those surfaced recently from iCloud.

Never remotely said that

Who never remotely said that? The original post I was responding to was from macs4all -- are you him? His argument was essentially that your data is safer with Apple, ostensibly because of their privacy policy, and that their business model is the perfect one because everybody is tired of being data-mined, so Apple is who you should trust your data with.

That's a bit disingenuous -- if you read more of the articles about the Apple bug, you will find insiders that claim, basically, that it was bound to happen, because of the culture inside Apple.

And a couple of months later, it happened again -- Apple patched 26 bugs, each of which could allow remote code execution, and half of those had been reported to them by google.

Look I don't care whether or not you believe that at some point enough anecdotes stacked end to end amount to data.

But I still think it's stupid to say Apple is incented to do a better job with your data. Google absolutely needs people to be able to trust the internet, and AFAICT, it is in their DNA to take this seriously and to work hard to try to find and report flaws in, e.g. Apple's browser, as well as in their own stuff, because if enough Apple users stop doing stuff online, yes, google will be hurting.

Apple absolutely needs this trust too, in order to have the market keep growing. But they weren't born an internet company, and although they are learning, IMHO, their security is nowhere near as mature as Google's.

My point is a bunch of anecdotes don't make an argument

Which is obviously why you keep focusing on the anecdotes and ignoring, e.g. the study I pointed to, which says, for the typical user using applications from the exact same well-known companies, more data gets leaked on Apple than on google.

Which says it's not just their security model. I would say that Apple is still learning about how to use data properly, Facebook and linkedin are focused on exactly how far they can go, and google has internalized some sort of compromise on data handling that nobody who uses Facebook should bat an eyelash at, and that even a lot of people who hate facebook can accept.

More to the point, google actually tries to apply this consistently as much as possible, which only nets them grief because of their universal privacy policy.

Apple's privacy policy may be "better" than google's in some theoretical fashion, but if more user data is leaked via iOS apps than Android apps, how is that better in the real world for a typical phone user?

http://www.computerworld.com/a...
Bumping from 16-GB to 64-GB costs approximately $25 in parts, or less considering Apples bulk purchasing power.. But Apple of course charges a $100 premium.

From TFA that's not in TFS:

The company [Google] did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Correct link should possibly be: http://www.computerworld.com/a...

Somewhere near you, usually funded by IBM.

See the computerworld article.

But some colleges are still providing Cobol training -- with help from IBM. The mainframe vendor has developed curricula in association with more than 80 colleges and universities ranging from Brigham Young to Texas A&M.

"We donate hardware and software, help with the curriculum, and they graduate hundreds of people every year," says Kevin Stoodley, an IBM fellow and CTO.

and this:

"They take kids from disadvantaged neighborhoods and provide them as consultants,"

"I is like your consultant, innit".

> I'm an H1-B, relocated from Denmark, working in SF, and I can assure you that I'm not cheaper :)

OP is a douche. But you are letting your personal experience blind you to the reality.
The top 10 H1B employers are all off-shorers, and that together they account for roughly one-third of all H1B visas.

For what little it is worth, my position is that H1B should be replaced with a mandatory immigration visa - that if you get an H1B you are fast-tracked for a green-card in 2 years and if you haven't become a citizen in 5 years then your green-card is cancelled and you are disqualified from any other work visas for 5 more years. This is not a popular position to hold, yet as far as I can tell it is one that most closely matches the rhetoric around H1B being a solution to a lack of skilled employees (versus the reality of it being primarily a way to put downward pressure on wages)

Recent comments by Alan Greenspan paint a dire picture of primary education in the United States:

"We cannot manage our very complex, highly sophisticated capital structure with what's coming out of our high schools."

"If we're not going to educate our kids, bring in other people who want to become Americans."

Under such dire circumstances and an existential threat, now is not the time for bias.

Slashdot ran a story that 60TB Disk Drives Could Be a Reality In 2016 based on promises made by Seagate.

Rather than a doubling, it seems like hard drives are continuing to go up by 2TB in the first half of the year and an additional 2TB (for a total of 4TB increase) by the second half of the year. So, it seems more likely that in 2015 we will see 10TB and 12TB drives and then in 2016 there will be 14TB and 16TB drives. While a 16TB drive is impressive, it is still only a quarter of the size promised. Also, at a rate increase of 4TB per year, we will be at 30TB by the end of the decade which is still half the 60TB prediction.

While there are some applications which could take advantage of the additional storage space, there are more applications that could take advantage of the improved performance provided by SSD. So the million dollar question seems to be at what price point and density does SSDs have to reach before the industry phases out hard drives? I don't think hard drives can mature fast enough any longer to survive to the end of the decade.

No thanks, I want my phone's maps and navigation on my car display.

You might have just hit on the reason for the delay. They charge $600 for that GPS system in the car and I'm sure Garmin, Tom Tom, Magellan, & Nokia are lobbying to keep their turf safe.

Music subscription services too.

I'd love to have a car interface to my phone apps on my car's screen, something like chromecast, but gets data from the phone instead of the internet, and the ability to send back interactions from a knob, a couple buttons, and touch.

You mean like MirrorLink?

Geez, this is the most idiotic comment I've seen on Slashdot all day, and that's saying something. You couldn't be bothered to do a 30 second web search before implying that Apollo had no benefits?

http://web.archive.org/web/201...
http://m.computerworld.com/s/a...
http://www.the-scientist.com/?...
http://www.consumerreports.org...

Examples from those links: improved dialysis machines, credit card swipes, army field rations, improved building insulation, low recoil/shock rubber, cordless household appliances, cheaper Teflon and Velcro, asbestos-free fire proof textiles, better industrial lubricant, exercise equipment improvents used by pro sports teams, a great deal of insight into how the moons and planets formed, many rocket technology advances used in today's ICBMs and missile defense systems, etc., etc., etc.

Please, next time do five minutes of research before you post something so bonehead with so much conviction.

The Patent Office, in an effort to modernize and attract more talent (you know, accept less salary for your engineering/science degree by working for the government instead of the private sector) implemented a plan to permit people to work from home, and from there to work remotely from the city the Office itself is located at, any city you want (within the 48 contiguous states). This was a natural outgrowth of an earlier (and successful) effort to eliminate paper at the office and work entirely electronically.

The actual source material for the Post article appears to show growing pains that one can reasonably expect from permitting thousands of employees to do their work from home, hundreds or even thousands of miles from the Office (if they qualify). Whereas the Post article seems written intentionally to inflame the reader (for what... maybe to sell more advertising? build cred for the writer?), the source material shows no wide-spread fraud, just your typical employees finding that, with the freedom to work at home, it's real easy to put your work off until deadline and then cram, or not put in the hours you would if you had a supervisor looking into your cubicle each morning. Same shit the private sector has been dealing with for years.

From what I can tell from the source, the management of the PTO is on it, and has been on it at least since the report came out in 2012. The only difference is that, because this is government, it's public and everyone can arm-chair quarterback their asses (probably as they themselves goof off at their terminals at work or from inside their momma's basement), whereas if a private company were going through this, it would be an internal matter and none of your damned business.

The Patent Office performs a function that is crucial; not even the Koch brothers would deny that. Shitting on the whole lot of them because a couple of employees can't handle the freedom of telework is unfair and dishonest, particularly coming from people taking suspiciously long lunch hours to write comments on slashdot :-|

Look at this. And this and this and even this.

Raaawrgh. Not the "this, this and this" dance again. ;) Let me FTFY...

"Look at Microsoft Open Technologies. And .NET Foundation and a Computerworld article about Internet of Things and even Codeplex."

A good rule of thumb is that the sentence should be readable even without seeing which URLs the hyperlinks point to.

Look at this. And this and this and even this.

Raaawrgh. Not the "this, this and this" dance again. ;) Let me FTFY...

"Look at Microsoft Open Technologies. And .NET Foundation and a Computerworld article about Internet of Things and even Codeplex."

A good rule of thumb is that the sentence should be readable even without seeing which URLs the hyperlinks point to.

Not so much anymore. http://www.computerworld.com/s... http://www.darkreading.com/ris...

And yet when you talk to people who actually repair computers instead of users, reliability for Apple notebooks are right in the middle. http://www.computerworld.com/s...

How many people does solyndra employ today? Where are the green jobs?

Here they are. The solar industry of the USA now employs more people than the coal industry of the USA.

Funny how you weren't aware of that fact, isn't it? It's almost as if your media sources chose not to mention it, because it doesn't fit their narrative.

This is the recurring problem with the left. They promise everyone a world of rainbows and unicorn cheeseburgers. But when push comes to shove... you fail. You don't deliver.

Or, they succeed, but the right-wing media bubble pretends not not notice. Cherry-picking reality might help them keep their market share in the short run, but as time goes on more and more people will realize they're full of shit.

How about the ability to re-flash one on board ECU to attack the rest. Disable the breaks, push the throttle to the floor and yank the steering wheel side to side? The only thing they didn't do was attack it remotely.

But just imagine a current attack vector today:
  * Remotely infecting a personal computer -- Demonstrated, publicly available
  * Tethered infection of PC to mobile phone -- Demonstrated, publicly available
  * Bluetooth infection of common SOCs on pacemakers -- Not published
  * Pacemaker delivery of ill effects to user -- Demonstrated, details not public

As more consumer-friendly devices are produced that have a close connection to humans and are marketable, the number of attack vectors increases.

Regardless of whether bADlOGIN was trolling, he is actually completely right.

Consider this article, referenced by the source. It says insurers might like to provide home automation and other "internet of things" devices for free. It mentions the "Teen Safe Driver Program" as an example of how this "free as in beer" program could work. So how does that program work? A black box in your car records events, sends it to the insurance company, and AFTER the insurance company reviews it, the parents might be given a copy of the data. That's right, the insurance company injects itself between parent and child, taking over the parent's job. Naturally, they have their own motivations which are separate from the proper parenting of children. This is espionage.

Now MS and insurance companies want to do the same for your home? That is prison.

Microsoft has been interested in home computing for decades with little to show for it beyond the X-Box. The main problem is that there is little in a home that needs to be computerized/automated/networked that hasn't already been from the beginning. A washing machine was a great automation, but there is no real need to automate it further. Have your lights turn on automatically when you come home? Nifty trick, but no one cares really. The only killer-app for home automation is spying on the residents and that is not desirable by the residents. Do they expect us to let insurance companies and other wealthy interests spy on us 24-7 in exchange for "free as in beer" worthless gadgets? To sweeten the bait they may attempt to find gadgets that are more useful. But those are just a trap.

Also, keep in mind the security of the devices. When the makers' intention is to spy on the users, there is little motivation to keep the device secure from even more spying. OpenSSL showed how a monoculture is insecure even if it is open source. Open standards with independent implementations provide security through diversity.

Can M$ be trusted with this http://www.computerworld.com/s... . M$ and insurance companies partner to make insurance cheaper? The whole system is sounding way, way to invasive. The internet of things with cameras, microphones, security systems (motion and heat detectors, monitoring all access and egress points), computers, modem and mobile phone. Everything you ever say or do can be monitored, recorded, filtered (make nothing look bad whilst hiding the good) and used against you by anyone with access, both government and corporate.

Uniform standard for connection is a bad idea much smarter would be strong limits on connections with secured protocols for different classes of appliances. Some protocols would be internal only and blocked from reaching out across the internet. Others would be restricted to only specific kinds of encrypted access perhaps even with legislated controls on that access. Very few would have 'open' unencrypted access. So how about a name change. THE ALLSEEN AND SECURED ALLIANCE as a reminder of what you need to be focused on.

PS exactly how much money has the NSA put into this :(.

- Perl 5 and earlier: An interpreter written in C.

Not exactly. The interpreter compiles the source files into a bytecode and executes it on a stack-based virtual machine: ahref=http://perlbin.sourceforge.net/perlcompiler/perl.internals.pdfrel=url2html-14852http://perlbin.sourceforge.net...>

- Python: An interpreter written in C.

A virtual machine in C: http://www.troeger.eu/files/teaching/pythonvm08.pdf

- Ruby: An interpreter written in C.

A virtual machine in C: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YARV

Or in C++: http://rubini.us/

Or against the JVM (which is written in C++): http://jruby.org/

- Lua: An interpreter written in C.

A virtual machine in C: http://www.lua.org/doc/jucs05.pdf

- Tcl: An interpreter written in C.

A virtual machine in C: https://www.tcl.tk/community/tcl2002/archive/Tcl2002papers/kenny-bytecode/paperKBK.html

- PHP: An interpreter written in C.

Hey, you got one. However the they are currently revising the language to make it compatible with adding a JIT later: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9248637/PHP_keepers_plot_radical_revision_of_the_language

And Facebook has their own C++ VM: http://hhvm.com/

- UNIX shells: Interpreters written in C.

Different problem space.

Before the Internet, Computerworld was the only browsing distracton at work: '80 Mbytes of storage for under $12k!' and other ad favorites through the years

> "We'll obviously learn details soon enough, but for now, we are left to wonder whether it'll be Apple or Google that ends up owning the automotive market." Or BlackBerry who currently is the dominant player?

Ford switches to QNX.

Most of us have no sympathy whatsoever for the people who have initiated widespread surveillance of us.

Thankfully, our current President is both technologically-savvy to understand the problem and committed to openness and transparency in government to want to fix it. Is not he?

Adam Savage ran into this before.

Either AT&T is incompetent, or (quite possibly) the Canadian carriers are gouging.

This is hardly the first time we've heard of this happening. And I doubt it will be the last.

there are only two major smartphone OSs. [...] Windows phone (not many of those out there)

Where are you drawing the line for "major" and "not many of those"? According to three-week-old data by Canalys and ABI Research, Windows Phone trails iOS by about the same ratio by which iOS trails Android. But otherwise, I see your point that there are enough people whose previous smartphone run Android that switchers from Android would make up a large portion of iPhone and Lumia buyers.

http://www.computerworld.com/s...

You need to take back the web from Firefox, because it has a toolbar button you don't like, and a third-party addon didn't work correctly?

Please reread my comment, it was not that I did not like the toolbar button. As I also mentioned in my comment, those issues were the last straw for me, i.e., the last of a series poor planning decisions that the Firefox developers have made. So I, like many other FireFox users, am going elsewhere.

Firefox risks irrelevance as mobile browsing booms --- Without an effective mobile browser strategy, in four months Mozilla will fall to No. 4 in a five-browser market

...Mozilla's case hasn't been helped by a steady drain on its desktop user share, which in April slipped to 17% of all desktop browsers, down from 20% a year earlier....

"I would also predict that the vast majority of our customers would never be caught in the buying the additional buckets of usage, that we will always want to say the basic level of usage at a sufficiently high level that the vast majority of our customers are not implicated by the usage-based billing plan."

"640k ought to be enough for anyone*"

"Let them eat cake"

*Looks like Gates never said that

I oppose the massive use of H1Bs myself, but if they are coming in anyway, it will only aid assimilation if the wife can go out and work everyday instead of just sitting at home.

I say make the H1B a mandatory fast-track to a green card, then the spouse can work and both are more likely to actually settle here.

As it is now, the majority of H1B visas are used for off-shoring - they bring the person over, train them up for a year or so and then send them back. If these H1B holders really creme-de-la-creme, then we don't want them to go home. We want them to settle here and become full citizens as soon as possible.

It does if you're a government contractor, apparently...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/je...
http://www.computerworld.com/s...
(and thousands more...)