If growing cotton was so profitable, why would Monsanto want to sell seeds?
In this case Monsanto would need land and workers and sales channels, which they don't have. Note also that farmers are subsidized, but a large corporation may not qualify, thus further skewing the comparison.
But a company that makes machines for making money would only need a place on a shelf and a little electric power. That is always available.
There is a thing called the division of labour which says that if each of us specialize, we will get more stuff done as a whole.
There is zero effort involved with taking a box from the assembly line and instead of shipping it to the customer just plugging it into the wall and letting it do its thing. The division of labor argument only works when there is labor. There is none here.
Also, if you are looking into investing, you can choose between a high-risk high-profit endeavour, like building chips for your own mining operation, or a low-risk low-profit endeavour, like building chips for other's mining businesses.
The "building chips" part is already a high risk endeavor, unless you plan to sell defective chips. The decision point comes after you have the properly working miner built.
By going the second route, you can hedge yourself against the uncertain final success of bitcoin, while pulling your profit from the general public's current and certain interest in bitcoin.
I fully agree here. BC mining is a business with diminishing returns, and there is no reason to waste time or money on it - the math probably says that you will not recoup your investment. Selling the miners to starry-eyed fools is, however, profitable. (Selling anything to fools is generally profitable:-)
Google is useful, and GP is correct. The US Department of Treasury is not a bank at all, let alone the central bank. Per Wikipedia:
The Treasury prints and mints all paper currency and coins in circulation through the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and the United States Mint. The Department also collects all federal taxes through the Internal Revenue Service, and manages U.S. government debt instruments.
The Federal Reserve System (also known as the Federal Reserve, and informally as the Fed) is the central banking system of the United States.
I understand that you are being helpful - thanks! But since we are discussing advantages (whatever few) and disadvantages of Win8, here is my review of these methods. Did that just a moment ago.
Win+Q. This just brings up the "All apps" mode. See below. BTW, this is not an obvious key combination. It does nothing in Win7.
Start screen + "All apps." Cannot do that, there is no "All apps" on this screen. P.S. I found it in the bottom bar after right-clicking on the start screen. The training costs just clicked up by another million dollars in an average enterprise:-)
Charms menu + Search. That brought up (same as Win+Q) a billion trillion of tiles, all randomly placed in the screen seemingly in the order of installation. They cannot be dragged. They are not sorted. They are grouped by folders in the start menus (such as "AIMP3", "Crimson Editor", etc. This order cannot be changed, and the groups cannot be collapsed. As result I see all these millions of tiles and for the life of me cannot figure out what I'm seeing. The information overload is too great.
Earlier versions of Windows had hierarchical menus that are automatically built as the software installs. They were structured as "Company" / "Product" / "Items". Very easy to see. Any subset of those shortcuts could be also pinned to the desktop, quick launch (WinXP) or the toolbar (Win7) and to the static start menu (Vista/Win7.) This allows the user the greatest flexibility, allowing to create his favorite launchers as he sees fit.
Win8 only allows pinning to the start menu and to the toolbar. Pinning to the desktop requires to create the shortcut manually. For added convenience, the Start Menu folder tree is gone from the user's home directory (I cannot find it, at least.) You can pin to the toolbar... but only as long as you have enough space there. If you are a busy professional and run many different applications you will run out of space very soon. Pinning to the start screen requires that you delete most of the automatically placed tiles from there... and then GOTO 1 since they become lost in space. Thanks to MS there is no way to create folders in the Start screen to keep less useful tiles there.
Win8 is a huge step back for a power user - and in the enterprise all decision makers and drivers of processes are power users. If your engineering department says in no uncertain terms that they don't want this $ then the IT will bow deeply and obey - because the engineering is a profit center, and the IT is the cost center. Win8 takes away important, necessary customization and replaces it with this "one size fits all" interface that really only fits tablet users, and even that remains to be seen. As one example, tiles pinned to the Start screen and Toolbar have no Properties, so you cannot set the compatibility mode, for example. Desktop shortcuts retain that - but they are not created automatically. What a pain!
As far as a "classic shell" there is in fact such a thing that exists today. No need to wait on Microsoft.
You only need to find an IT director who will upgrade 100,000 desktops under his command on a belief that some company released some free software that may or may not be doing the essential function that the business depends on. Note that this function is going against the wishes of Microsoft and can be blocked by a patch at any time.
Win8 will not be accepted by the enterprise until it can function out of the box exactly like Windows 7, or very close to that. Win8 does have some good improvements under the hood. However the new GUI completely kills its chances in the enterprise. I have two Win8 RC here, one in a VM and another loaded onto a notebook. I cannot efficiently use them. I simply cannot find the software!!1! If it is present on the start screen I can't scroll enough to see it; if it is deleted from the start screen then it goes into no man's land and cannot be started at all. Pinning to the desktop is not an option; only the toolbar is supported. Searching for software is not an option either - how the hell do I know what software is installed on this box? I had to go to Program Files and drag shortcuts onto the desktop by hand. How many users will be able to do that?
Three types of people commit suicide. The confused, the desperate, and the cowardly.
Imagine that you are 80 years old and have $1 million in the bank. One day your doctor tells you that you are incurably ill and will start suffering unbearable pain tomorrow. The doctors can give you additional 100 days of life for the low cost of $10K per day. Then you will die anyway, and your family - or needy charities - will have nothing. You decide to commit suicide instead. Will you be confused, desperate or cowardly as you jump from the roof?
If you don't like my example then feel free to imagine a war hero who accepts a mission that will save thousands of men but will have him killed. Who will be that hero, using the short list of options that you provided?
My point here is simple. Suicide can be also a rational choice.
Everything depends on volume and liability, of course.
This is a very important factor. It costs me more than $10K to make a production run. There is no way I will be spending this money for an experiment with generic capacitors.
If you have a bunch of decoupling caps on the board, you'd probably want to run them and the substitutes on a component/network analyzer and make sure their as-shipped performance is in the same ballpark.
It's not easy to even test a capacitor. You need to build a test fixture for it, with a 50 Ohm port, and to qualify that fixture alone. Sure it's possible, it's not something that an EE graduate can't put together with some parts from Minicircuits. But it's work, and in about 100% of the cases it's a wasted effort if the parameter that you are after is in the datasheet.
I had to look for special parts several times. For example, components in PLL loop filters must be not microphonic... and most ceramic capacitors are, very much so. But that is a problem that an engineer understands at the design phase of the circuit because you cannot take a mica or a film capacitor and squeeze it into a 0402 footprint of a ceramic multilayer capacitor. Generally most of those mistakes that we are talking about here stem from poor selection of parts. Ripple current is one example - it can destroy the capacitor over time if the part is not rated for the abuse. Derating for higher or lower temperatures is frequently ignored. Operating at the edge of temperature range (esp. for commercial parts) is common. I have a network switch here with a failing power supply. Want to know the reason? The inductor in the buck switcher is heating up so much that I cannot touch it. Something else heats up... and here you are, a dead power supply. It doesn't help that they have a few cheap aluminum electrolytic caps just next to the red hot inductor.
Mistakes like that happen when parts are either poorly selected to begin with, or selected with razor thin margins, or not sufficiently specified by the engineer, or replaced by a less suitable part later. There are other scenarios. Remember the failures of Fujitsu drives? Someone else, an IC manufacturer, changed their process - and the drives started dropping dead like flies.
Sure if you have rather rigorous design process, you make strides towards the circuit that does not depend on unspecified properties of the parts. But there's only so far you can go in that direction, there's a point where you have to test alternatives.
If you look at older receivers, made with early semiconductors, you will note how resilient their designs are against variations in the characteristics of transistors. Each stage had smaller gain, but it was very stable, DC and AC wise. But today many designers prefer to depend on known, more stable parameters of parts. Note that the redundancy in the design costs real money. Many PHBs - who hold the purse strings - tell the engineers to make it simpler. That's where the minimum requirements come from. Add to that the fact that a modern design cycle is extremely short, and even the lifetime of a product is often under a couple of years. You simply don't have calendar time to do aging tests, even accelerated ones. Your first real data about aging comes from the customers, when the whole production run is sold and you are working on a 3rd generation of the device, with all new components because parts are getting obsolete faster than you can find them on Digikey.
you'd actually have an engineer do part qualification prior to ordering anything that reaches the customer
If the product contains 1,000 components and each can be bought from just three vendors, how many combinations do you need to test, and will the Universe be still habitable by the time you are done?
The engineer just says "100 pF, 5%, C0G, 0603, 25V, no special RF requirements." The engineer cannot possibly know where this part will come from - there are thousands of vendors who offer these parts. Price, volume, terms - they are all different. The buyer takes your requirements and buys parts that fit. He may talk to you about some rare or special components, but common passives are not what you'd want to be bothered with. What can you possibly say for Stackpole vs. Panasonic? Do you plan to open a scientific research into the differences? I don't know where you work so that the engineer does the parts, but in companies that I worked for this is plain impossible.
whatever compliance testing you've done on your prototypes is null and void if you do part substitutions outside of the engineering process
The BOM is a part of engineering process, and any competent ERP will give you a list of substitutes. They will all conform to the requirements, on paper. The EMC testing does not ask for substitutes; haven't done the UL testing, can't say what they want.
Touch-screen-ing an 82 inch display makes sense, but at desktop scales that's like sitting 3 inches from your monitor
I have a 25" LED monitor in front of me. I can barely touch its center with a fully extended right arm. My fingers don't reach the edges of the screen unless I lean forward. Why would I do that? This is bad for posture, this is bad for vision. From my position in the chair I simply cannot touch the monitor.
But even if I could touch it, just imagine how much effort would it require to swipe across such a large monitor! I could do it a few times; but in the course of just reading the fine Slashdot one needs to scroll a hundred times. This is not feasible, and I have no interest in ever getting large touch monitors. As matter of fact, one of my friends has one - and the first thing he did he asked me to disable touch. It has no function there. It is good only for palm-sized devices, where touch and gesture operations are not just natural - they are also energy-efficient.
I was at a japanese steakhouse while out of town helping an old friend pack up his apartment
That is different from the subject of the thread. When you are with your friends you can do whatever you want, and even your friends will not remember what you did or did not do:-)
The thread is about social pressure that is being applied to young workers to make them drink. This is wrong. I do not work in Korea (nor I was ever there visiting) but if I were, I would never set foot into any such orgy. If they don't want me to work for them I will gladly quit because obviously their way of doing things is not acceptable to me. As matter of fact, after the work ends I leave for home. I have no need to socialize with my coworkers - at least because I had no say in selecting them. I have friends, and I meet with them pretty often, but those friends were not assigned to me randomly.
Now find the balance between cost of production, and people returning products - there is a point where cheap parts (with a predicatable failure process/rate) end up making a better profit.
There are many reasons why that would be the case. For example:
One person buys, another person witnesses the failure. Common with gifts and products installed by others.
Warranty documents are lost. Who saves a store receipt for three years?
The extended warranty scam. The customer finances the manufacturer for the failure of an item. Failures follow the bathtub curve: high in the beginning, low in the middle, high in the end. Extended warranty sells you the warranty for the middle of the curve, where the device is least likely to fail. But if it fails early the manufacturer gets paid.
"I must have been holding it wrong, it's all my fault!"
Customers who are too busy or too disorganized to timely file a warranty claim.
High shipping costs make warranty claims on sub-$100 items unprofitable. Cheaper to scrap the device and buy a new one.
The fault attributed to, or hidden by the natural wear and tear. Crack the plastic case, get no warranty even if the failure is unrelated. Other reasons to not honor the warranty.
Poor handling of warranty repairs. Microsoft was famous for receiving an Xbox with RROD and shipping it, without looking, as a replacement unit to another customer. Eventually some of them got thrown out of a window - sale!1!
Accounting tricks that use returned products to justify better tax rates.
Management who is only concerned with Christmas sales, no matter what happens in January.
Cheap parts and cheap processes that save more money that is lost on warranty claims.
Fly by night manufacturers who cannot be found for warranty claims.
That's just the most obvious scenarios. One could, of course, wonder why manufacturers don't want to maintain their good name. But that's because who makes TVs - LG, Sony, Samsung and a handful of other players. You are stuck with them no matter what, and they all cheat this way. You may get angry at Viewsonic and buy LG, but another customer is angry with LG and buys Viewsonic. It's like airlines - there are too few of them and they are all bad. Smaller Chinese companies simply don't care, there are enough customers for them in the world. They can also sell under any trade name you want, even if the device is made at the same factory.
Why companies need to save a few bucks on capacitors on a $2000 television will never make sense to me.
The manufacturers take cheap components that they use in cheap products and design expensive products with them. Those components, like capacitors, are often purchased in large volume. An engineer sometimes doesn't even have a better part in the database. Often the engineer doesn't even know what part will be purchased for this or that position - as long as they are all similar the buyer will make that decision. When the time comes to buy parts the PHB will always point his finger at a mountain of compatible components that is already in the cage instead of going out, researching and negotiating a new set of prices on a new part - which may have its own problems.
How easily can you type me an equation or a chart?
I have studied before those newfangled laptops became widely available. I wrote my notes on paper, with a very nice ink pen. I wrote faster than most people could type - and much faster when equations and charts and drawings were involved. I do not even understand why would anyone want to use a laptop for such things. Writing and commenting the material is essential for understanding.
As others commented earlier in this thread, you cannot reimage a school computer without having an image that the school maintains.
You could use DBAN; but then the computer would be dead in the water without the OS.
You could install Windows from a standard DVD and use the license code from the sticker; or you could reinstall from the recovery partition. But that would be the factory default install, with tons of preinstalled demos and none of the school-installed applications. That would not be a very good solution; quite opposite, it would be a good case of destruction of the government property since all school software is now gone.
The only thing the shop could do is to clean it up. Since this spyware does not show up anywhere, they didn't know about its existence. Even if they did know, they couldn't have it removed without a password - and the FBI dad either forgot it or never had it written down, or just didn't pay attention. FBI special agents are good in many aspects of criminal investigations, but very few are computer experts. Those experts are not chasing criminals in the streets, they are sitting in the labs, taking criminals' computers apart. Given that there are more computers than criminals, they have their hands full, and the FBI management will never send a good tech into the street work (even if they are competent to do that - and I'd think that none are.)
the parent failed due diligence when it came to removing the offending program.
Did he even have a duty to remove that program? I would think not; the most one can expect is to have the school laptop returned in one piece. If I were the school tech I wouldn't even attempt to start it - the HDD would be pulled out and inserted into the reimaging setup.
But let's assume for a moment that he did have such a duty. The next question is, did he do a reasonable effort? For example, you notice that brakes in your car are not good anymore. You go to the dealership. They fiddle with the car for a while, then return it, take your money and say that the car is done. On your way home the brakes fail and you kill a pedestrian. Are you guilty of driving a defective car? No, because you did all that you were expected to do - you hired a licensed professional to make sure that your car is good to go. They failed. You did not. You are not expected to fix your car; it's not even possible these days without a massive expense.
In this case the FBI dad hired a computer expert to do the work. The expert failed and the software was not uninstalled. If the expert failed, how could one expect a non-expert to be successful here? Note that the town in question is very small and remote, and probably that "expert" is not of a high caliber.
To summarize: the dad did not have to uninstall anything; and though he tried, he was not entirely successful. None of that is a crime. The principal took a public computer and instead of sending it in to the tech for reimaging he used it for his naughty browsing - and got exposed. Well, don't be stupid. Don't do illegal things on public computers to begin with, and don't do illegal things on computers that you are not sure about - they could have all kinds of software on them. In this case that's exactly what happened.
Plus, I don't buy the whole "oops, I was accidentally spying on you" line.
Perhaps you'd be not entirely wrong if you are a nice looking woman who talks about her male neighbor who is a police officer. But in this case why would a LEO care about spying upon someone unknown to him who would be the next kid to use the laptop? Why would that LEO be sure that the laptop wouldn't be reimaged by the school? What would he have to gain? As far as I can see, the LEO dad gained nothing but more work, loss of a friend, and a likely internal investigation into his activities.
However, if he had to actually peruse through the links, and check them out, to see that it may have been child porn.... thats not very incidental.
Imagine that you removed a certain piece of software that used to send you those reports. You turned the laptop off a week ago and never saw those reports again. Now all of a sudden you get another report. What would be your first action?
I don't know how other people would go about it, but I personally would look at the entire message trying to understand if this is one of older reports that got somehow stuck in the email system. After all, I would know the pattern of browsing that my son did. The delayed email is exactly what I would suspect - the software had been deleted, isn't it so? If this is a delayed report then it's from my son's period of use and I should review it just as I always did. I paid for the software, after all, this is my own report. I would have no reason to believe that this is someone else's browsing record.
But as soon as I start looking I realize that something is seriously wrong here. Those links... I never saw them before, and even the URLs themselves are revealing the content. Did my kid really go there? At this point I would be reading everything, and very carefully too.
Once I finish reading I would clearly understand that, however impossible, the software was NOT deleted, and someone else was using the laptop. The dates of visits all match up, and I would have checked by then that I have all the previous reports, so this can't be a delayed email - and my son is not in posession of the laptop for some time by now.
This is how I would end up reading the whole report.
What's the "legal grey area" answer for installing malware on someone else's machine?
1) This spyware is not malware because it is not distributed against the law or explicitly to violate the law. A screwdriver can be used to break into a house, but most uses of a screwdriver are perfectly legal.
2) There is a well understood need (and a duty) of a parent to be aware of their kid's activities. While some may oppose the surveillance of this type, it is not illegal, and it is a well defined tool of a parent. No court would ever hold it against the dad.
3) The right of that surveillance may have been affected by the physical inability to install. However the school laptop was not locked down to prevent installations. Any reasonable person would assume that the school has no objection to installations of software. If they had, they'd make it impossible.
4) The parent did his part in trying to remove the software prior to the return of the laptop. As matter of fact, he did more than he was expected to do - he went to the computer service shop and asked them to remove the software. Past that point the continued existence of the software is not his fault.
5) The school should have reimaged the laptop as soon as it landed on their bench. They would have done that too; but the school official decided to keep the laptop for his personal needs, so it was never reimaged. Bad choice. The laptop is a government's property and a very fair game for a government's investigator.
Imagine you are walking at night, accidentally glance at a lit window of a nearby house and see a crime in progress. Your actions would be:
0) Do nothing. You have no right to this information. You do your best to forget what you saw and keep walking.
1) Knock on the door and tell the robbers that they should stop their life of crime - or at least to close the curtains. Then leave and forget the encounter.
2) Call 911 immediately, stay in vicinity to meet the police, explain what you saw and direct them to the house.
Note that I don't expect it to be legal if you intentionally walk around at night and look into people's homes. However innocently coming across an evidence of the crime and sitting on it is very much illegal, and an FBI agent certainly is aware of that.
I don't know what procedures they have at FBI, but off-duty police officers remain police officers; they can stop crimes, they can report suspicious activity, and most importantly they have a right to talk to other people as much as anyone else. In worst case the FBI dad was doing an unauthorized investigation in his own time; but there is no law against that. For example, an off-duty police officer may follow a suspect for a while to understand if his actions are illegal (and warrant calling it in) or perfectly legal. For example, if you see a drunk walking out of the bar and into the parking lot with an open bottle in hand, it all depends on what seat in the car he takes. Note that the FBI dad did not use his position to get privileged information - the ISP did not volunteer that, and he did not demand further.
From an ethical standpoint, the moment he opened that email, he was crossing a very clear line into unethical (if not illegal) behaviour.
I don't know how that particular person has his email client set up. But my email clients open the message in the lower pane at the same time as I click on it in the list for any reason - even to delete. It can be argued that viewing of the message is automatic. As the judge noted, viewing of the following messages already constituted an investigation. But, being an FBI agent, the dad was not only competent to investigate but probably also required to do it by his oath. It's up to the FBI to figure out if his personal actions were proper or not.
Then they replaced Program Manager with the Start Menu and people lost their minds.
In 1995 Windows was not everywhere, and adherence to the Program Manager was not that strong. But for those who had to have Program Manager... guess what, it was a part of Win95; you only had to open the start menu folders with Explorer - and you could make shortcuts for those, and autostart them...
Now they are replacing the Start Menu with live tiles or whatever they are called, and people are losing their minds.
Can you imagine replacing a library catalog with a long flat list of all books in the library, sorted by an arbitrary key and including minor, regional newspaper issues as well as major books of major writers? A list that is 100,000,000 items long. Written in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Can you use that list? Wouldn't you rather wish that you had a catalog where you could say "I want fiction", "I want crime fiction", "I want it written in last 10 years", and so on.
But, some say, Windows has the new and wondrous way of starting programs. You just type their name and it shows up. Can you imagine going to the library and using this method to find books? Perhaps you will find a few that you have read already; but you will never discover books that you forgot the title of, and you will never find books that you never heard of.
I have Win8 RC installed, and I cannot use it. This thing is OK for a simplistic kiosk, but any serious work on it is impossible. This is my opinion, of course, but I am not alone in that.
Right. As if a "city thug" would know the first thing about how to slaughter and butcher a cow (without killing himself with e. coli), let alone how to plant and harvest a crop.
You are right about farming. But, if experience of the USA in 1930's, as well as experience of Russia in 1990-2012, teaches us any lessons, criminals simply turn to racket. Criminals directly own very few properties - clubs, primarily. Other businesses are controlled. The owner of the business remains in charge of production; however selling of the product is now done by the gang, and the owner is only paid enough to not die from hunger. All the profit goes to racketeers.
This is not only important because the gang doesn't know how to plant crops or how to care for calves. It is also important because it provides continuous profit, as opposed to one-time raid with all movable property taken, the rest - burned, and the owners - killed. You get a wasteland this way. But note that in Zimbabwe roving gangs of ZANU-PF soldiers did exactly that - the genocide of white farmers - and they couldn't care less about what happens to the country.
These events happen way before the country descends into anarchy or a civil war. A weaker government enables gangs to do this by being unable to maintain law and order. Corrupt bureaucrats facilitate "the business of protection" - as in "Nice shop you have here! It would be a shame if something happens to it..." Conversely, a strong government can exterminate the mafia.
Slashdot Mirror
If growing cotton was so profitable, why would Monsanto want to sell seeds?
In this case Monsanto would need land and workers and sales channels, which they don't have. Note also that farmers are subsidized, but a large corporation may not qualify, thus further skewing the comparison.
But a company that makes machines for making money would only need a place on a shelf and a little electric power. That is always available.
There is a thing called the division of labour which says that if each of us specialize, we will get more stuff done as a whole.
There is zero effort involved with taking a box from the assembly line and instead of shipping it to the customer just plugging it into the wall and letting it do its thing. The division of labor argument only works when there is labor. There is none here.
Also, if you are looking into investing, you can choose between a high-risk high-profit endeavour, like building chips for your own mining operation, or a low-risk low-profit endeavour, like building chips for other's mining businesses.
The "building chips" part is already a high risk endeavor, unless you plan to sell defective chips. The decision point comes after you have the properly working miner built.
By going the second route, you can hedge yourself against the uncertain final success of bitcoin, while pulling your profit from the general public's current and certain interest in bitcoin.
I fully agree here. BC mining is a business with diminishing returns, and there is no reason to waste time or money on it - the math probably says that you will not recoup your investment. Selling the miners to starry-eyed fools is, however, profitable. (Selling anything to fools is generally profitable :-)
Google is useful, and GP is correct. The US Department of Treasury is not a bank at all, let alone the central bank. Per Wikipedia:
I understand that you are being helpful - thanks! But since we are discussing advantages (whatever few) and disadvantages of Win8, here is my review of these methods. Did that just a moment ago.
Win+Q. This just brings up the "All apps" mode. See below. BTW, this is not an obvious key combination. It does nothing in Win7.
Start screen + "All apps." Cannot do that, there is no "All apps" on this screen. P.S. I found it in the bottom bar after right-clicking on the start screen. The training costs just clicked up by another million dollars in an average enterprise :-)
Charms menu + Search. That brought up (same as Win+Q) a billion trillion of tiles, all randomly placed in the screen seemingly in the order of installation. They cannot be dragged. They are not sorted. They are grouped by folders in the start menus (such as "AIMP3", "Crimson Editor", etc. This order cannot be changed, and the groups cannot be collapsed. As result I see all these millions of tiles and for the life of me cannot figure out what I'm seeing. The information overload is too great.
Earlier versions of Windows had hierarchical menus that are automatically built as the software installs. They were structured as "Company" / "Product" / "Items". Very easy to see. Any subset of those shortcuts could be also pinned to the desktop, quick launch (WinXP) or the toolbar (Win7) and to the static start menu (Vista/Win7.) This allows the user the greatest flexibility, allowing to create his favorite launchers as he sees fit.
Win8 only allows pinning to the start menu and to the toolbar. Pinning to the desktop requires to create the shortcut manually. For added convenience, the Start Menu folder tree is gone from the user's home directory (I cannot find it, at least.) You can pin to the toolbar... but only as long as you have enough space there. If you are a busy professional and run many different applications you will run out of space very soon. Pinning to the start screen requires that you delete most of the automatically placed tiles from there... and then GOTO 1 since they become lost in space. Thanks to MS there is no way to create folders in the Start screen to keep less useful tiles there.
Win8 is a huge step back for a power user - and in the enterprise all decision makers and drivers of processes are power users. If your engineering department says in no uncertain terms that they don't want this $ then the IT will bow deeply and obey - because the engineering is a profit center, and the IT is the cost center. Win8 takes away important, necessary customization and replaces it with this "one size fits all" interface that really only fits tablet users, and even that remains to be seen. As one example, tiles pinned to the Start screen and Toolbar have no Properties, so you cannot set the compatibility mode, for example. Desktop shortcuts retain that - but they are not created automatically. What a pain!
As far as a "classic shell" there is in fact such a thing that exists today. No need to wait on Microsoft.
You only need to find an IT director who will upgrade 100,000 desktops under his command on a belief that some company released some free software that may or may not be doing the essential function that the business depends on. Note that this function is going against the wishes of Microsoft and can be blocked by a patch at any time.
Win8 will not be accepted by the enterprise until it can function out of the box exactly like Windows 7, or very close to that. Win8 does have some good improvements under the hood. However the new GUI completely kills its chances in the enterprise. I have two Win8 RC here, one in a VM and another loaded onto a notebook. I cannot efficiently use them. I simply cannot find the software!!1! If it is present on the start screen I can't scroll enough to see it; if it is deleted from the start screen then it goes into no man's land and cannot be started at all. Pinning to the desktop is not an option; only the toolbar is supported. Searching for software is not an option either - how the hell do I know what software is installed on this box? I had to go to Program Files and drag shortcuts onto the desktop by hand. How many users will be able to do that?
Three types of people commit suicide. The confused, the desperate, and the cowardly.
Imagine that you are 80 years old and have $1 million in the bank. One day your doctor tells you that you are incurably ill and will start suffering unbearable pain tomorrow. The doctors can give you additional 100 days of life for the low cost of $10K per day. Then you will die anyway, and your family - or needy charities - will have nothing. You decide to commit suicide instead. Will you be confused, desperate or cowardly as you jump from the roof?
If you don't like my example then feel free to imagine a war hero who accepts a mission that will save thousands of men but will have him killed. Who will be that hero, using the short list of options that you provided?
My point here is simple. Suicide can be also a rational choice.
Everything depends on volume and liability, of course.
This is a very important factor. It costs me more than $10K to make a production run. There is no way I will be spending this money for an experiment with generic capacitors.
If you have a bunch of decoupling caps on the board, you'd probably want to run them and the substitutes on a component/network analyzer and make sure their as-shipped performance is in the same ballpark.
It's not easy to even test a capacitor. You need to build a test fixture for it, with a 50 Ohm port, and to qualify that fixture alone. Sure it's possible, it's not something that an EE graduate can't put together with some parts from Minicircuits. But it's work, and in about 100% of the cases it's a wasted effort if the parameter that you are after is in the datasheet.
I had to look for special parts several times. For example, components in PLL loop filters must be not microphonic... and most ceramic capacitors are, very much so. But that is a problem that an engineer understands at the design phase of the circuit because you cannot take a mica or a film capacitor and squeeze it into a 0402 footprint of a ceramic multilayer capacitor. Generally most of those mistakes that we are talking about here stem from poor selection of parts. Ripple current is one example - it can destroy the capacitor over time if the part is not rated for the abuse. Derating for higher or lower temperatures is frequently ignored. Operating at the edge of temperature range (esp. for commercial parts) is common. I have a network switch here with a failing power supply. Want to know the reason? The inductor in the buck switcher is heating up so much that I cannot touch it. Something else heats up... and here you are, a dead power supply. It doesn't help that they have a few cheap aluminum electrolytic caps just next to the red hot inductor.
Mistakes like that happen when parts are either poorly selected to begin with, or selected with razor thin margins, or not sufficiently specified by the engineer, or replaced by a less suitable part later. There are other scenarios. Remember the failures of Fujitsu drives? Someone else, an IC manufacturer, changed their process - and the drives started dropping dead like flies.
Sure if you have rather rigorous design process, you make strides towards the circuit that does not depend on unspecified properties of the parts. But there's only so far you can go in that direction, there's a point where you have to test alternatives.
If you look at older receivers, made with early semiconductors, you will note how resilient their designs are against variations in the characteristics of transistors. Each stage had smaller gain, but it was very stable, DC and AC wise. But today many designers prefer to depend on known, more stable parameters of parts. Note that the redundancy in the design costs real money. Many PHBs - who hold the purse strings - tell the engineers to make it simpler. That's where the minimum requirements come from. Add to that the fact that a modern design cycle is extremely short, and even the lifetime of a product is often under a couple of years. You simply don't have calendar time to do aging tests, even accelerated ones. Your first real data about aging comes from the customers, when the whole production run is sold and you are working on a 3rd generation of the device, with all new components because parts are getting obsolete faster than you can find them on Digikey.
I don't know who you call a "buyer"
Well, here is an example.
you'd actually have an engineer do part qualification prior to ordering anything that reaches the customer
If the product contains 1,000 components and each can be bought from just three vendors, how many combinations do you need to test, and will the Universe be still habitable by the time you are done?
The engineer just says "100 pF, 5%, C0G, 0603, 25V, no special RF requirements." The engineer cannot possibly know where this part will come from - there are thousands of vendors who offer these parts. Price, volume, terms - they are all different. The buyer takes your requirements and buys parts that fit. He may talk to you about some rare or special components, but common passives are not what you'd want to be bothered with. What can you possibly say for Stackpole vs. Panasonic? Do you plan to open a scientific research into the differences? I don't know where you work so that the engineer does the parts, but in companies that I worked for this is plain impossible.
whatever compliance testing you've done on your prototypes is null and void if you do part substitutions outside of the engineering process
The BOM is a part of engineering process, and any competent ERP will give you a list of substitutes. They will all conform to the requirements, on paper. The EMC testing does not ask for substitutes; haven't done the UL testing, can't say what they want.
"No" is the answer to both your questions.
I do not accept drinking in any way, shape or form. No way I would be within a mile from that place.
Touch-screen-ing an 82 inch display makes sense, but at desktop scales that's like sitting 3 inches from your monitor
I have a 25" LED monitor in front of me. I can barely touch its center with a fully extended right arm. My fingers don't reach the edges of the screen unless I lean forward. Why would I do that? This is bad for posture, this is bad for vision. From my position in the chair I simply cannot touch the monitor.
But even if I could touch it, just imagine how much effort would it require to swipe across such a large monitor! I could do it a few times; but in the course of just reading the fine Slashdot one needs to scroll a hundred times. This is not feasible, and I have no interest in ever getting large touch monitors. As matter of fact, one of my friends has one - and the first thing he did he asked me to disable touch. It has no function there. It is good only for palm-sized devices, where touch and gesture operations are not just natural - they are also energy-efficient.
I was at a japanese steakhouse while out of town helping an old friend pack up his apartment
That is different from the subject of the thread. When you are with your friends you can do whatever you want, and even your friends will not remember what you did or did not do :-)
The thread is about social pressure that is being applied to young workers to make them drink. This is wrong. I do not work in Korea (nor I was ever there visiting) but if I were, I would never set foot into any such orgy. If they don't want me to work for them I will gladly quit because obviously their way of doing things is not acceptable to me. As matter of fact, after the work ends I leave for home. I have no need to socialize with my coworkers - at least because I had no say in selecting them. I have friends, and I meet with them pretty often, but those friends were not assigned to me randomly.
Now find the balance between cost of production, and people returning products - there is a point where cheap parts (with a predicatable failure process/rate) end up making a better profit.
There are many reasons why that would be the case. For example:
That's just the most obvious scenarios. One could, of course, wonder why manufacturers don't want to maintain their good name. But that's because who makes TVs - LG, Sony, Samsung and a handful of other players. You are stuck with them no matter what, and they all cheat this way. You may get angry at Viewsonic and buy LG, but another customer is angry with LG and buys Viewsonic. It's like airlines - there are too few of them and they are all bad. Smaller Chinese companies simply don't care, there are enough customers for them in the world. They can also sell under any trade name you want, even if the device is made at the same factory.
Why companies need to save a few bucks on capacitors on a $2000 television will never make sense to me.
The manufacturers take cheap components that they use in cheap products and design expensive products with them. Those components, like capacitors, are often purchased in large volume. An engineer sometimes doesn't even have a better part in the database. Often the engineer doesn't even know what part will be purchased for this or that position - as long as they are all similar the buyer will make that decision. When the time comes to buy parts the PHB will always point his finger at a mountain of compatible components that is already in the cage instead of going out, researching and negotiating a new set of prices on a new part - which may have its own problems.
My less than symbol got nixed because it was thinking I meant hypertext markup
You are welcome to use this one: < (written as < - all four characters required.)
How easily can you type me an equation or a chart?
I have studied before those newfangled laptops became widely available. I wrote my notes on paper, with a very nice ink pen. I wrote faster than most people could type - and much faster when equations and charts and drawings were involved. I do not even understand why would anyone want to use a laptop for such things. Writing and commenting the material is essential for understanding.
As others commented earlier in this thread, you cannot reimage a school computer without having an image that the school maintains.
You could use DBAN; but then the computer would be dead in the water without the OS.
You could install Windows from a standard DVD and use the license code from the sticker; or you could reinstall from the recovery partition. But that would be the factory default install, with tons of preinstalled demos and none of the school-installed applications. That would not be a very good solution; quite opposite, it would be a good case of destruction of the government property since all school software is now gone.
The only thing the shop could do is to clean it up. Since this spyware does not show up anywhere, they didn't know about its existence. Even if they did know, they couldn't have it removed without a password - and the FBI dad either forgot it or never had it written down, or just didn't pay attention. FBI special agents are good in many aspects of criminal investigations, but very few are computer experts. Those experts are not chasing criminals in the streets, they are sitting in the labs, taking criminals' computers apart. Given that there are more computers than criminals, they have their hands full, and the FBI management will never send a good tech into the street work (even if they are competent to do that - and I'd think that none are.)
the parent failed due diligence when it came to removing the offending program.
Did he even have a duty to remove that program? I would think not; the most one can expect is to have the school laptop returned in one piece. If I were the school tech I wouldn't even attempt to start it - the HDD would be pulled out and inserted into the reimaging setup.
But let's assume for a moment that he did have such a duty. The next question is, did he do a reasonable effort? For example, you notice that brakes in your car are not good anymore. You go to the dealership. They fiddle with the car for a while, then return it, take your money and say that the car is done. On your way home the brakes fail and you kill a pedestrian. Are you guilty of driving a defective car? No, because you did all that you were expected to do - you hired a licensed professional to make sure that your car is good to go. They failed. You did not. You are not expected to fix your car; it's not even possible these days without a massive expense.
In this case the FBI dad hired a computer expert to do the work. The expert failed and the software was not uninstalled. If the expert failed, how could one expect a non-expert to be successful here? Note that the town in question is very small and remote, and probably that "expert" is not of a high caliber.
To summarize: the dad did not have to uninstall anything; and though he tried, he was not entirely successful. None of that is a crime. The principal took a public computer and instead of sending it in to the tech for reimaging he used it for his naughty browsing - and got exposed. Well, don't be stupid. Don't do illegal things on public computers to begin with, and don't do illegal things on computers that you are not sure about - they could have all kinds of software on them. In this case that's exactly what happened.
Plus, I don't buy the whole "oops, I was accidentally spying on you" line.
Perhaps you'd be not entirely wrong if you are a nice looking woman who talks about her male neighbor who is a police officer. But in this case why would a LEO care about spying upon someone unknown to him who would be the next kid to use the laptop? Why would that LEO be sure that the laptop wouldn't be reimaged by the school? What would he have to gain? As far as I can see, the LEO dad gained nothing but more work, loss of a friend, and a likely internal investigation into his activities.
However, if he had to actually peruse through the links, and check them out, to see that it may have been child porn.... thats not very incidental.
Imagine that you removed a certain piece of software that used to send you those reports. You turned the laptop off a week ago and never saw those reports again. Now all of a sudden you get another report. What would be your first action?
I don't know how other people would go about it, but I personally would look at the entire message trying to understand if this is one of older reports that got somehow stuck in the email system. After all, I would know the pattern of browsing that my son did. The delayed email is exactly what I would suspect - the software had been deleted, isn't it so? If this is a delayed report then it's from my son's period of use and I should review it just as I always did. I paid for the software, after all, this is my own report. I would have no reason to believe that this is someone else's browsing record.
But as soon as I start looking I realize that something is seriously wrong here. Those links... I never saw them before, and even the URLs themselves are revealing the content. Did my kid really go there? At this point I would be reading everything, and very carefully too.
Once I finish reading I would clearly understand that, however impossible, the software was NOT deleted, and someone else was using the laptop. The dates of visits all match up, and I would have checked by then that I have all the previous reports, so this can't be a delayed email - and my son is not in posession of the laptop for some time by now.
This is how I would end up reading the whole report.
What's the "legal grey area" answer for installing malware on someone else's machine?
1) This spyware is not malware because it is not distributed against the law or explicitly to violate the law. A screwdriver can be used to break into a house, but most uses of a screwdriver are perfectly legal.
2) There is a well understood need (and a duty) of a parent to be aware of their kid's activities. While some may oppose the surveillance of this type, it is not illegal, and it is a well defined tool of a parent. No court would ever hold it against the dad.
3) The right of that surveillance may have been affected by the physical inability to install. However the school laptop was not locked down to prevent installations. Any reasonable person would assume that the school has no objection to installations of software. If they had, they'd make it impossible.
4) The parent did his part in trying to remove the software prior to the return of the laptop. As matter of fact, he did more than he was expected to do - he went to the computer service shop and asked them to remove the software. Past that point the continued existence of the software is not his fault.
5) The school should have reimaged the laptop as soon as it landed on their bench. They would have done that too; but the school official decided to keep the laptop for his personal needs, so it was never reimaged. Bad choice. The laptop is a government's property and a very fair game for a government's investigator.
Imagine you are walking at night, accidentally glance at a lit window of a nearby house and see a crime in progress. Your actions would be:
0) Do nothing. You have no right to this information. You do your best to forget what you saw and keep walking.
1) Knock on the door and tell the robbers that they should stop their life of crime - or at least to close the curtains. Then leave and forget the encounter.
2) Call 911 immediately, stay in vicinity to meet the police, explain what you saw and direct them to the house.
Note that I don't expect it to be legal if you intentionally walk around at night and look into people's homes. However innocently coming across an evidence of the crime and sitting on it is very much illegal, and an FBI agent certainly is aware of that.
I don't know what procedures they have at FBI, but off-duty police officers remain police officers; they can stop crimes, they can report suspicious activity, and most importantly they have a right to talk to other people as much as anyone else. In worst case the FBI dad was doing an unauthorized investigation in his own time; but there is no law against that. For example, an off-duty police officer may follow a suspect for a while to understand if his actions are illegal (and warrant calling it in) or perfectly legal. For example, if you see a drunk walking out of the bar and into the parking lot with an open bottle in hand, it all depends on what seat in the car he takes. Note that the FBI dad did not use his position to get privileged information - the ISP did not volunteer that, and he did not demand further.
From an ethical standpoint, the moment he opened that email, he was crossing a very clear line into unethical (if not illegal) behaviour.
I don't know how that particular person has his email client set up. But my email clients open the message in the lower pane at the same time as I click on it in the list for any reason - even to delete. It can be argued that viewing of the message is automatic. As the judge noted, viewing of the following messages already constituted an investigation. But, being an FBI agent, the dad was not only competent to investigate but probably also required to do it by his oath. It's up to the FBI to figure out if his personal actions were proper or not.
Was the task of reimaging a computer truly that daunting for them?
It is that daunting indeed if you don't have the image.
Then they replaced Program Manager with the Start Menu and people lost their minds.
In 1995 Windows was not everywhere, and adherence to the Program Manager was not that strong. But for those who had to have Program Manager... guess what, it was a part of Win95; you only had to open the start menu folders with Explorer - and you could make shortcuts for those, and autostart them...
Now they are replacing the Start Menu with live tiles or whatever they are called, and people are losing their minds.
Can you imagine replacing a library catalog with a long flat list of all books in the library, sorted by an arbitrary key and including minor, regional newspaper issues as well as major books of major writers? A list that is 100,000,000 items long. Written in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Can you use that list? Wouldn't you rather wish that you had a catalog where you could say "I want fiction", "I want crime fiction", "I want it written in last 10 years", and so on.
But, some say, Windows has the new and wondrous way of starting programs. You just type their name and it shows up. Can you imagine going to the library and using this method to find books? Perhaps you will find a few that you have read already; but you will never discover books that you forgot the title of, and you will never find books that you never heard of.
I have Win8 RC installed, and I cannot use it. This thing is OK for a simplistic kiosk, but any serious work on it is impossible. This is my opinion, of course, but I am not alone in that.
On the other hand, no one seems capable of figuring out Windows 8 without significant confusion
For starters, how about two Internet Explorers, one in Metro and one on Desktop, that have nothing to do with each other? :-)
(Besides, Metroified IE is an abomination on a large screen, and a waste of time.)
I also found that the easiest way to shut the Win8 down is with Alt-F4. All other methods are an exercise in frustration.
Right. As if a "city thug" would know the first thing about how to slaughter and butcher a cow (without killing himself with e. coli), let alone how to plant and harvest a crop.
You are right about farming. But, if experience of the USA in 1930's, as well as experience of Russia in 1990-2012, teaches us any lessons, criminals simply turn to racket. Criminals directly own very few properties - clubs, primarily. Other businesses are controlled. The owner of the business remains in charge of production; however selling of the product is now done by the gang, and the owner is only paid enough to not die from hunger. All the profit goes to racketeers.
This is not only important because the gang doesn't know how to plant crops or how to care for calves. It is also important because it provides continuous profit, as opposed to one-time raid with all movable property taken, the rest - burned, and the owners - killed. You get a wasteland this way. But note that in Zimbabwe roving gangs of ZANU-PF soldiers did exactly that - the genocide of white farmers - and they couldn't care less about what happens to the country.
These events happen way before the country descends into anarchy or a civil war. A weaker government enables gangs to do this by being unable to maintain law and order. Corrupt bureaucrats facilitate "the business of protection" - as in "Nice shop you have here! It would be a shame if something happens to it..." Conversely, a strong government can exterminate the mafia.