You do realize women watch porn too right? So what he's blind doesn't mean his wife didn't watch it. Also he freely admits he can see something as he uses screen magnification at work to do his job. Not saying not innocent just it isn't only guys that watch porn and he isn't completely blind either so still a possibility that he did it.
How about a bluetooth sensor? You could tell it to randomly call you in 2min stddev 1min whenever that jerks phone is in range. Doesn't completely ignore the jerk but at least will put a limit to how much of your time they can waste.
But you do realize government spending hires people too right? Every dollar the government spends would go towards hiring people and buying equipment from other people who will have to hire people too, provided that they make reasonable efforts to do the project right. You give a dollar of tax breaks or incentives to companies and you'll only see a fraction of it back into employees pockets. The rest will go to shareholders pockets (while they earned it, still it isn't hiring anyone and unless it is spent it won't), raises/bonuses to people who already have jobs or worse sit in a cash account "just in case" a la Apples 76B horde.
Might I add too, there is a huge line up of people that would love to go on a mission even if it only had half-assed safety planning. Its risky we get it, when do I fly? I mean people jump into test cars at high speed, and new fighter planes etc all the time. It's risky but I bet most test pilots would rather the same risk to be the first to land on mars versus the first person to do a high negative g turn on test plane 12 of the F35 program.
Someone's feature is another one's bug. Things like getting rid of the normal menu. Okay some people like the simplification, other people see it as an extra click every time they want to get to the menu they want. Sure there shortcuts for most things, but a lot of them are different between apps and who can remember 10+ shortcuts for each app they use (I can't)? Nothing stops them from dropping shortcuts or changing what they map to either. Heck ctrl-v could be changed to paste to tweeter in a future version and you wouldn't know it until it happened. FF is also going to auto-update and not even give you a "What's new" page at startup of the new version. So they are going to push these updates on you and not even tell you what version your running or what the changes were. Crazy.
My understanding is that those restrictions due to monopoly power abuses have lapsed. No a company does not have to play by a different set of rules indefinitely only until their "sentence" has been served. What good is it to continue to punish a company and its 10's of thousands of employees livelihoods because of some stupid mistake that might have been done under several generations of previous management, when the laws weren't clearly defined in the industry etc? At some point companies get another chance, for example: AT & T for a while wasn't allowed to do anything but domestic phone service from what I understand. But after a while they were allowed to add cell service, internet etc. You only need to break the monopoly not the company.
And everything is for selfish reasons. Even if you do it because it is a good thing to do, you still did it because You thought it was a good thing to do. Everything is selfish even something as trivial as posting to/. it fulfills some need to communicate/have my opinion heard. If it didn't provide me any enjoyment/reputation etc I'd just spend another 5 minutes browsing for porn instead;-)
I think at some level networking equipment companies in general suffer from this problem. For example appliances that track employees internet usage beyond simply acting as a firewall to protect company resources. Boss says sure check your bank account at work on your break, it helps have a reasonable quality of life. But then someone even higher up has decided that they will monitor everything everyone does. Or filtering sites based on some automatic algorithm that decides bad or good. In my experience it ends up with any forum where anyone has used a word that is offensive is blocked. This in turn filters how even handed the information your employees get about products they are looking at for your company. Ie. if it is a fucking piece of shit I want to hear about it and know why that person said that. i might not agree with it but if I'm never allowed to see it but can only see all the positive marketing bullshit out there because there is no swearing on that site it is crazy. I even get MSDN and the like occasionally blocked because again someone might have said something offensive, or it is a "forum" well duh it is also how I figure out how to do things sometimes.
You have to have 10.6.8 according to the keynote in order to have the right version of the App store to download the OS. I'm not sure if you only have 10.5 if they will give you a copy of a OS 10.6 disk so you can upgrade and then go to 10.7 through the app store or if they are just going to make physical disks eventually available for people that want to skip a release, or maybe they'll have people go to the Appstore and have a genius upgrade them to 10.6 using a disk they use for service and fire off the 10.7 install for them.
Yep, so I assume they will keep a record of your purchase in the app store like Amazon does with Kindle books. If you loose the OS you'll be able to download it again. That said not sure if you have a completely new HDD how easy that will be. You'll probably have to connect the disk to a working computer, copy the files over and then put it in the Mac and boot to install. Or of course there might be a thumb drive boot option so you'd just put the new disk in, get a copy on a thumbdrive and boot/install from there.
Ahm, no. Microsoft got it's dominant position because it was early and there is network affects to be had by everyone using the same platform. That would have been the case whether it was MS or Apple or VMS, or OS/2 that got market share. One could argue that MS is more open than the large competitors those days. They made windows to run on any PC compatible hardware. Not just something you bought from Apple or IBM. I think it is the right tradeoff for most people, freedom in choice of hardware and everyone having compatible software for the network affects. You can find other ways of doing things if you wish but a lot of companies are willing to fork out a few hundred dollars per desktop to make sure that they will be able to work with the customers, suppliers etc.
"In what is supposed to be a land of unlimited cheap labor". Everything has a limit. The thing with China is that most of the manufacturing is happening at the coasts. People migrate in droves but this drives up the cost of living. Wages rise and eventually will be come marginally competitive. Similarly moving things to Cambodia, Vietnam etc. Eventually the flood of money will cause prices to raise negating some but perhaps not all the benefit of outsourcing there.
You can look at it at a company level too. You offer 1/4th the price to win the contract. Next renewal you offer 1/3rd etc. Always cheap than other options but getting closer and closer. Not doing that you are just giving away money. You only need to come in low enough to win the contract any more and your throwing money away.
Hmm, I realize laptop screens are small but most of them can still do 720p. So... if you don't want compressed video you could have ~10 blurays on the laptop. Sure you can compress or go for "reasonable" quality but then you could go all the way down to 240X320 you just probably won't want to. A lot of things sound reasonable for a "normal" user. Not everyone on/. is that person though. For example my home computer is a Mac, I have two versions of windows in virtual machines and one of linux. I have ~30GB of music and 300GB of movies/TV shows. Dozens of apps in all operating systems (whether real or VM). Say I start working part time at home and part time at the office with a laptop. I'll have to find a way to keep everything in sync or us a VPN or something to access network shares at work to save things. Versions of apps between computers might not be the same even if they were it would be double the cost for each program since I need it on two devices. Cloud services makes it so I don't have to care how much data I have (other than I have to pay for it, it doesn't matter that my laptop HDD is 1/3 the size) or which device I'm using a program on (it's the same program for all devices including my officemates or a hotel computer). There are advantages, maybe not for the average user, however since when was cutting edge technology meant for the average user (or even should be)? SSD drives aren't, 4+GB ram quad core machines aren't etc. They are meant for the odd niches of people: graphic designers, programmers, engineers, gamers etc. Normal "I spend 5hrs a day on Facebook" guy could get by with a netbook. Anything extra is just a perk/penis enlargement (bigger screen look better, me get one ah ah ah). Is it nice to have and make you somewhat happier, sure, but they don't need the top of the line system. Similar with cloud, not useful for everyone, but for those that it is it is a huge time saver versus having to sync every device of which you might have half a dozen, and pay for licenses, manage updates etc.
Is that a good thing? Do you really need to work like that? Imagine if I keep changing a comma to a period and you were doing the opposite. Do you have a concrete example of an actual non-poncy task where that level of, $deity forgive me, temporal granularity would be necessary?
Yes. Programming. Business policy documents that are in the works, school reports that I'm working on with a team etc. The other option is to email versions back and forth and then end up filling up your inbox with multiple inconsistent copies of the document. Not a good thing. There are other ways around this problem like revision control but that still requires an always on internet/network connection so might as well be hosted in the cloud.
Now I can understand why, for example, a traveling salesman might need to get the latest prices, stock availability and the like. But that'd be a sporadic update or synchronization of data he should already have. That's emphatically not the same as keeping everything up in cuckoo land.
How about multiple devices? Apples cloud offering syncs everything for you whenever it gets the chance. I'm not huge on that as if you have say and iPad and iPhone you'll be hitting both devices with data usage everytime something changes and that can be quite costly. But a travelling salesmen with a desktop computer a laptop and a phone might want it. They start working on the quote on their big computer at home. Drag the laptop to the office to chat with management (still have the document without having to think about it) and then go on the road and when the client calls they still have access to the latest version of the document. They don't have to stop and sync whichever next device they choose to use.
It isn't just a glorified dropbox in my opinion. A cloud offering is usually a combination of data in the cloud + services. Again many reasons to like it and many not (fear of data security, flaky internet connection whatever). You pay a bill and presto everyone in the company can use the software no month plus IT deployment across the organization. Decide it doesn't suit? Don't renew the contract and try someone else. You haven't invested several hundred dollars per workstation on software that turned out not the be the best. Have a client you want to collaborate with? Again you aren't asking them to invest a lot of money just a small fee and they'll be using the same system as you and so you'll know how it should work for them. No "oh we don't have Office 2007 here yet" problem, everyone that you collaborate with using the same vendors products gets updated at the same time. There is a flip side to that though, if you really really like the way things are now you might get pissed off if the user interface changes all of a sudden and you have no ability to stay with the old version. You get upgrades as part of the service without pain of IT deployment, but they get crammed down your throat whether you want them or not. That is the train off you need to be willing to live with if you go with the cloud.
Since you shuttle data back and forth you can easily collaborate with anyone else (everyone has the same way of accessing the file as you), you can use multiple devices without the need to sync them. You have someone else managing the security and backups of the system. When a new version of the software is available it is available immediately, usually with out any or very little downtime for everyone in your organization. When you layoff half your staff you just buy less access, etc. Lots of reasons why it could make sense for a company.
What the gripe in this post is about though is bandwidth caps. I don't like them either but really they shouldn't "kill" the cloud. Companies considering going to cloud services need to consider all the costs in doing so. One of those is access to the internet, if you corporate internet is already slow if everyone has to work off it full time you are going to need to consider a serious upgrade on your internet connection. The cost of cloud services isn't just the service it is the connectivity to the service and the cost of the added reliance on your internet connection. If when your internet connection goes down you will be unable to conduct any work than that is a different story than some people can't access a few spreadsheets for a couple hours.
As well when you do find one that isn't capped they often have rediculously slow speeds. I've seen 5Mbps/256kb for ~$40 with no cap. But 5Mbps is a cap all to its own. What I end up doing is running way way past the cap. The large providers (Bell, and Rogers/Shaw) stop penalizing you after a bit. I have a 50/2 connection with a cap of 175GB (but they count both up and download, so if you use a torrent and keep a good ratio you pay twice the size of the file in cap space). I just leave everything seeding and download everything I can possibly want. They will charge me 0.50 for the first 50GB extra but after that its free. So I hit them for 300-500GB extra a month, why just download episodes as you watch them when you can download the entire program in HD for free as long as you do it in a month you are already well over the cap?:-)
Yeah it sounds rediculous that conservation makes prices go up. Utilities I've dealt with (both in Canada and Germany) are privatized distributors. The thing is the cost of laying and maintaining things like power lines and gas lines doesn't decrease to half just because you are using half. There still are wind storms blowing down things, pipes leak, bills still need to be sent etc. So the cost will go up per unit of the resource you use because you have to pay for all the infrastructure with less sales. Whether or not they can justify a doubling is another matter (though to be fair oil prices have doubled in the last 4 years too).
At least in my experience with small companies in Canada, there connections already have caps. Not sure about larger companies with bigger infrastructure (the one I worked for only had a 5/5Mbps connection symmetric and they paid something like $200 a month for it, crazy but I guess that is business grade connections for you).
Companies are already used to paying for bandwidth with can act as an effective cap on the a amount of data you can use. It might just make companies better able to tie the cost of a project to its value. If you build out an internal network, servers. SAN etc you have a hard time nailing down managers to the cost of their projects. It is always a guessing game, oh I don't know a 4 socket server should do. Then it sits ideal for a year and then gets loaded up with a bunch of VMs or other services sitting on it. The original purchasing department doesn't want to accept the whole cost associated with the original project because the equipment is now being used for multiple things etc. With cloud services you can in theory break down the cost for each separate project because you see the disk usage, backups, download and upload rates etc to each virtual server and/or service. The question than becomes is your project worth the money we are spending in on, instead of a constant negotiation of what level of charge back each group pays for the SAN and switching etc.
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You do realize women watch porn too right? So what he's blind doesn't mean his wife didn't watch it. Also he freely admits he can see something as he uses screen magnification at work to do his job. Not saying not innocent just it isn't only guys that watch porn and he isn't completely blind either so still a possibility that he did it.
How about a bluetooth sensor? You could tell it to randomly call you in 2min stddev 1min whenever that jerks phone is in range. Doesn't completely ignore the jerk but at least will put a limit to how much of your time they can waste.
But you do realize government spending hires people too right? Every dollar the government spends would go towards hiring people and buying equipment from other people who will have to hire people too, provided that they make reasonable efforts to do the project right. You give a dollar of tax breaks or incentives to companies and you'll only see a fraction of it back into employees pockets. The rest will go to shareholders pockets (while they earned it, still it isn't hiring anyone and unless it is spent it won't), raises/bonuses to people who already have jobs or worse sit in a cash account "just in case" a la Apples 76B horde.
Oh Canada ... true north strong and free.
Might I add too, there is a huge line up of people that would love to go on a mission even if it only had half-assed safety planning. Its risky we get it, when do I fly? I mean people jump into test cars at high speed, and new fighter planes etc all the time. It's risky but I bet most test pilots would rather the same risk to be the first to land on mars versus the first person to do a high negative g turn on test plane 12 of the F35 program.
Why not just sit on your national debt. It'll get you to mars in less than 19 years.
Yes I am a satanist how did you know?
That won't work. They all would be variations of the same word.
Someone's feature is another one's bug. Things like getting rid of the normal menu. Okay some people like the simplification, other people see it as an extra click every time they want to get to the menu they want. Sure there shortcuts for most things, but a lot of them are different between apps and who can remember 10+ shortcuts for each app they use (I can't)? Nothing stops them from dropping shortcuts or changing what they map to either. Heck ctrl-v could be changed to paste to tweeter in a future version and you wouldn't know it until it happened. FF is also going to auto-update and not even give you a "What's new" page at startup of the new version. So they are going to push these updates on you and not even tell you what version your running or what the changes were. Crazy.
My understanding is that those restrictions due to monopoly power abuses have lapsed. No a company does not have to play by a different set of rules indefinitely only until their "sentence" has been served. What good is it to continue to punish a company and its 10's of thousands of employees livelihoods because of some stupid mistake that might have been done under several generations of previous management, when the laws weren't clearly defined in the industry etc? At some point companies get another chance, for example: AT & T for a while wasn't allowed to do anything but domestic phone service from what I understand. But after a while they were allowed to add cell service, internet etc. You only need to break the monopoly not the company.
And everything is for selfish reasons. Even if you do it because it is a good thing to do, you still did it because You thought it was a good thing to do. Everything is selfish even something as trivial as posting to /. it fulfills some need to communicate/have my opinion heard. If it didn't provide me any enjoyment/reputation etc I'd just spend another 5 minutes browsing for porn instead ;-)
I think at some level networking equipment companies in general suffer from this problem. For example appliances that track employees internet usage beyond simply acting as a firewall to protect company resources. Boss says sure check your bank account at work on your break, it helps have a reasonable quality of life. But then someone even higher up has decided that they will monitor everything everyone does. Or filtering sites based on some automatic algorithm that decides bad or good. In my experience it ends up with any forum where anyone has used a word that is offensive is blocked. This in turn filters how even handed the information your employees get about products they are looking at for your company. Ie. if it is a fucking piece of shit I want to hear about it and know why that person said that. i might not agree with it but if I'm never allowed to see it but can only see all the positive marketing bullshit out there because there is no swearing on that site it is crazy. I even get MSDN and the like occasionally blocked because again someone might have said something offensive, or it is a "forum" well duh it is also how I figure out how to do things sometimes.
Ah but in a lot of the world you can't legally download 1 tv show a day. Problem solved. Damn you Hulu for being US only.
awk s/post/nice :-)
You have to have 10.6.8 according to the keynote in order to have the right version of the App store to download the OS. I'm not sure if you only have 10.5 if they will give you a copy of a OS 10.6 disk so you can upgrade and then go to 10.7 through the app store or if they are just going to make physical disks eventually available for people that want to skip a release, or maybe they'll have people go to the Appstore and have a genius upgrade them to 10.6 using a disk they use for service and fire off the 10.7 install for them.
Yep, so I assume they will keep a record of your purchase in the app store like Amazon does with Kindle books. If you loose the OS you'll be able to download it again. That said not sure if you have a completely new HDD how easy that will be. You'll probably have to connect the disk to a working computer, copy the files over and then put it in the Mac and boot to install. Or of course there might be a thumb drive boot option so you'd just put the new disk in, get a copy on a thumbdrive and boot/install from there.
Ahm, no. Microsoft got it's dominant position because it was early and there is network affects to be had by everyone using the same platform. That would have been the case whether it was MS or Apple or VMS, or OS/2 that got market share. One could argue that MS is more open than the large competitors those days. They made windows to run on any PC compatible hardware. Not just something you bought from Apple or IBM. I think it is the right tradeoff for most people, freedom in choice of hardware and everyone having compatible software for the network affects. You can find other ways of doing things if you wish but a lot of companies are willing to fork out a few hundred dollars per desktop to make sure that they will be able to work with the customers, suppliers etc.
Oh right I forgot. Only the US can invade a country without a declaration of war without being called terrorists.
You can look at it at a company level too. You offer 1/4th the price to win the contract. Next renewal you offer 1/3rd etc. Always cheap than other options but getting closer and closer. Not doing that you are just giving away money. You only need to come in low enough to win the contract any more and your throwing money away.
Hmm, I realize laptop screens are small but most of them can still do 720p. So ... if you don't want compressed video you could have ~10 blurays on the laptop. Sure you can compress or go for "reasonable" quality but then you could go all the way down to 240X320 you just probably won't want to. A lot of things sound reasonable for a "normal" user. Not everyone on /. is that person though. For example my home computer is a Mac, I have two versions of windows in virtual machines and one of linux. I have ~30GB of music and 300GB of movies/TV shows. Dozens of apps in all operating systems (whether real or VM). Say I start working part time at home and part time at the office with a laptop. I'll have to find a way to keep everything in sync or us a VPN or something to access network shares at work to save things. Versions of apps between computers might not be the same even if they were it would be double the cost for each program since I need it on two devices. Cloud services makes it so I don't have to care how much data I have (other than I have to pay for it, it doesn't matter that my laptop HDD is 1/3 the size) or which device I'm using a program on (it's the same program for all devices including my officemates or a hotel computer). There are advantages, maybe not for the average user, however since when was cutting edge technology meant for the average user (or even should be)? SSD drives aren't, 4+GB ram quad core machines aren't etc. They are meant for the odd niches of people: graphic designers, programmers, engineers, gamers etc. Normal "I spend 5hrs a day on Facebook" guy could get by with a netbook. Anything extra is just a perk/penis enlargement (bigger screen look better, me get one ah ah ah). Is it nice to have and make you somewhat happier, sure, but they don't need the top of the line system. Similar with cloud, not useful for everyone, but for those that it is it is a huge time saver versus having to sync every device of which you might have half a dozen, and pay for licenses, manage updates etc.
Is that a good thing? Do you really need to work like that? Imagine if I keep changing a comma to a period and you were doing the opposite. Do you have a concrete example of an actual non-poncy task where that level of, $deity forgive me, temporal granularity would be necessary?
Yes. Programming. Business policy documents that are in the works, school reports that I'm working on with a team etc. The other option is to email versions back and forth and then end up filling up your inbox with multiple inconsistent copies of the document. Not a good thing. There are other ways around this problem like revision control but that still requires an always on internet/network connection so might as well be hosted in the cloud.
Now I can understand why, for example, a traveling salesman might need to get the latest prices, stock availability and the like. But that'd be a sporadic update or synchronization of data he should already have. That's emphatically not the same as keeping everything up in cuckoo land.
How about multiple devices? Apples cloud offering syncs everything for you whenever it gets the chance. I'm not huge on that as if you have say and iPad and iPhone you'll be hitting both devices with data usage everytime something changes and that can be quite costly. But a travelling salesmen with a desktop computer a laptop and a phone might want it. They start working on the quote on their big computer at home. Drag the laptop to the office to chat with management (still have the document without having to think about it) and then go on the road and when the client calls they still have access to the latest version of the document. They don't have to stop and sync whichever next device they choose to use.
It isn't just a glorified dropbox in my opinion. A cloud offering is usually a combination of data in the cloud + services. Again many reasons to like it and many not (fear of data security, flaky internet connection whatever). You pay a bill and presto everyone in the company can use the software no month plus IT deployment across the organization. Decide it doesn't suit? Don't renew the contract and try someone else. You haven't invested several hundred dollars per workstation on software that turned out not the be the best. Have a client you want to collaborate with? Again you aren't asking them to invest a lot of money just a small fee and they'll be using the same system as you and so you'll know how it should work for them. No "oh we don't have Office 2007 here yet" problem, everyone that you collaborate with using the same vendors products gets updated at the same time. There is a flip side to that though, if you really really like the way things are now you might get pissed off if the user interface changes all of a sudden and you have no ability to stay with the old version. You get upgrades as part of the service without pain of IT deployment, but they get crammed down your throat whether you want them or not. That is the train off you need to be willing to live with if you go with the cloud.
What the gripe in this post is about though is bandwidth caps. I don't like them either but really they shouldn't "kill" the cloud. Companies considering going to cloud services need to consider all the costs in doing so. One of those is access to the internet, if you corporate internet is already slow if everyone has to work off it full time you are going to need to consider a serious upgrade on your internet connection. The cost of cloud services isn't just the service it is the connectivity to the service and the cost of the added reliance on your internet connection. If when your internet connection goes down you will be unable to conduct any work than that is a different story than some people can't access a few spreadsheets for a couple hours.
As well when you do find one that isn't capped they often have rediculously slow speeds. I've seen 5Mbps/256kb for ~$40 with no cap. But 5Mbps is a cap all to its own. What I end up doing is running way way past the cap. The large providers (Bell, and Rogers/Shaw) stop penalizing you after a bit. I have a 50/2 connection with a cap of 175GB (but they count both up and download, so if you use a torrent and keep a good ratio you pay twice the size of the file in cap space). I just leave everything seeding and download everything I can possibly want. They will charge me 0.50 for the first 50GB extra but after that its free. So I hit them for 300-500GB extra a month, why just download episodes as you watch them when you can download the entire program in HD for free as long as you do it in a month you are already well over the cap? :-)
Yeah it sounds rediculous that conservation makes prices go up. Utilities I've dealt with (both in Canada and Germany) are privatized distributors. The thing is the cost of laying and maintaining things like power lines and gas lines doesn't decrease to half just because you are using half. There still are wind storms blowing down things, pipes leak, bills still need to be sent etc. So the cost will go up per unit of the resource you use because you have to pay for all the infrastructure with less sales. Whether or not they can justify a doubling is another matter (though to be fair oil prices have doubled in the last 4 years too).
Companies are already used to paying for bandwidth with can act as an effective cap on the a amount of data you can use. It might just make companies better able to tie the cost of a project to its value. If you build out an internal network, servers. SAN etc you have a hard time nailing down managers to the cost of their projects. It is always a guessing game, oh I don't know a 4 socket server should do. Then it sits ideal for a year and then gets loaded up with a bunch of VMs or other services sitting on it. The original purchasing department doesn't want to accept the whole cost associated with the original project because the equipment is now being used for multiple things etc. With cloud services you can in theory break down the cost for each separate project because you see the disk usage, backups, download and upload rates etc to each virtual server and/or service. The question than becomes is your project worth the money we are spending in on, instead of a constant negotiation of what level of charge back each group pays for the SAN and switching etc.