So what? It's required in both the US and EU. I have to do it for my products, why does LG get a pass? I'm seeing too many Chinese products that don't have the FCC marking or if going to Europe, just falsely provide information about their EMI testing in their declaration, especially for LED lights which are starting to interfere with a great deal of stuff lately. There's a reason these rules are setup in the first place and it's to avoid a situation just like in the article.
I've switched my whole office to libreoffice. Also, a lot of businesses just run older versions of office. Why should they bother purchasing a new version of office that doesn't offer anything spectacular over the old version? Every business I go around too is running Office that is +5 years old, a lot still running Office 2003!
Avaya has been making horrible equipment, especially for IP phones. If you want to make equipment that's closed source, closed to literally everything, require purchasing licenses just to add an extra phone and is incompatible with everything (Left overs from the Nortel era), what do you expect? They are still popular in the used phone system market, since they work good enough, but you no longer have support for it, other than your phone guy. Want to add a phone? What a big headache... Their much touted scalability is quite a sham when it requires a team of people just to add phones.
Meanwhile, I bought my office Yealink IP phones and they work great and literally compatible with everything, SIP (of course), including adding address books, supports VPN connections and very easy to manage. They also look great, sound great and the color touch screen is a big plus. They're not exactly cheap either. Yealink also doesn't handcuff me with licensing, restrictions and fees. Works great with Asterisk and I can add as many damn phones as I please.
People still need these phones, they're not going away any time soon, unless cellphones start linking your business phone extension, but a lot of people don't like doing that either. Much of the telecomms business moved onto VOIP providers, IP phones that work and your local IT support.
Though, I did enjoy Sumatra on Windows, the problem for me and others is that all these PDF viewers, either in linux or Windows, they don't have a lot of the nice features that Adobe Acrobat has that are just convenient to use (They literally suck). Automatically OCR a document, multipage viewing that adjusts nicely to your screen, combine PDFs or whatever documents into one PDF, scanning, all the nice tools for review and note taking, etc. I had to sacrifice a lot of this nice convenience for my employees who were used to this. But I'm willing to burn it all down if it means stopping them from spying on my industry.
I would agree with you, but since buying an XPS 13 with linux running on it, I've been quite happy. I would have never thought of buying a Dell either, but I did and I've been happy with it.
I don't know why Arch isn't on this list either. It has a great package manager, a comprehensive wiki and if you want the latest and greatest, it's not a problem to get it.
Why not? I've been using it for my production server setup just fine. It works great and does the job pretty well. I don't recommend it for everyone, but the LTS and rolling updates doesn't hurt me. If it breaks something, that's why I have a backup to take over so I can figure it out.
To be honest, I haven't had anything break for my business for years on Arch. It's been running my machines, connecting to PLC's for data, running my database, all the good things just fine. I think probably the worst thing was just the python 2 to python 3 move, but it turned out to be a non-issue, since 90% of my stuff ran fine on python 3, and Arch (Along with all the major distributions) offered python 2 to stick around for a long time until I moved over.
It doesn't even matter if it's illegal. I still see people using their phones while driving, whether or not it's legal. The problem is that it's difficult for people to disconnect from their devices while driving. And adding silly prevention measures to keep the device from working while driving will only force people to find ways to circumvent them.
Short of shutting down the entire mobile network, the only real direction I see is to start looking to the future of automated vehicles and mandating automatic features for vehicles just like some insurance companies mandate you have to have your lights on all the time. Some of these things can already be implemented in a very cost effective way to even old vehicles like automatic braking to prevent accidents.
You're not going to rip these devices off of people since many of them depend on it for whatever reasons and they'll find some way of using it during their commute. Then you have the whole "hands free" debacle when devices have surpassed the "hands free" era, when they can skype, email, text, whatever. And most of the application developers have no desire of making their application hands free nor care.
Probably. That's why I went with a Dell. I never believed I'd buy a Dell before, but I don't regret it. It's been pretty good and they've been really linux friendly of late, even their support. I remember when I could load linux onto Thinkpads without much issues (I have an old one running Freebsd on one without issues), not anymore.
I agree with you - I think the shareware model would work spectacularly well for movies.
I don't. If they started the shareware model before all the downloading started, it might have worked. Now, I just don't even care to watch their movies even if it's offered for free. Even if they hand delivered it to me for free to watch, I still wouldn't watch it. They've pretty much destroyed my taste in all the movies they've been pumping out, most of it has been absolute crap. When you want me to pay $20 per a movie ticket to determine if a movie is crap, when the chances are very high that the movie is going to be crap, well, no thanks.
Jobs' solution to "antenna-gate" as you call it, was to announce to the world that the phone was fine, people were just holding it incorrectly
No, the best part is that every manufacturer saw that Jobs can get away with it, so can we. Ever since then, we've been having phones with degrading services requiring carriers to build more towers. But that's ok, because the carriers decided we could charge A LOT more for services because we have to build more towers, so now everyone is happy! Until the next BS to come up.
There are plenty of offline map services on Android and they're pretty decent, especially where I can actually turn off traffic alerts (Have it track me online) or not. What bothers me is that Google pretty much can access my phone whenever they want. Ever try logging into your account? Yeah, what you can do there, they can do more.
In the meantime, I'm sure we'll have alternatives. The end of Cyanogen is not the end of roms. XDA forums is still there and I'm pretty sure Cyanogen is already forked. Hell, actually, its already been forked with many other projects...
I always figured people that wanted thin would just get the Macbook Air. People buying Macbook Pro's expected to have a powerful laptop and don't care how thin it is.
Sounds similar to what Sony did a few years back with their Vaios. The laptops had serious issues with wifi connectivity and Sony would send people from Japan to investigate the situation. You would think they would be sending people to repair the problem and resolve the situation once and for all. Nope. You'd get a nice email about how you're at fault for everything. Meanwhile, people continued to have issues with the wifi connectivity.
Did they ever fix the issue or offer a resolution? Nope. The whole thing ended up being a PR stunt.
Drives fail, it happens often in old CNC machines, and a good servo drive is going to cost you a huge chunk of change to replace (Since there is no support for them or warranty anymore). You might get lucky with some old guys that still fix them, but that line is thinning. It's 2017, I don't think you'll get much life out of that CNC machine you bought for 20k unless you retrofit it (You're really just driving until it breaks at this point). I used to play that game and found that it's not worth it, because it's going to break at the worst time possible. Getting parts for these ancient machines ends up being more of a chore and costing you more than a brand new machine or rebuilding it. Break that wonderful CRT touchscreen? There's a company on the east coast still making them for $10k each. Much cheaper to retrofit with new stuff instead.
Then you have permit issues of course, you have the requirement of having the panel listed. Most of these old CNC's are more likely from Japan (Kuraki, MoriSieki, most popular old brands at these auctions), are not listed. And OSHA's requirements (And most likely your insurance company too). Usually these retrofit companies will handle that.
You'd be surprised how much stuff can be gutted with the new controllers. You can take out that ancient computer running DOS that weighs a ton, with those ancient IO's (That nobody even knows what it does anymore) and replace it with something the size of a Raspberry Pi.
"There was a comment on the Windows 10 fiasco where one of their production machines was taken off line for a forced upgrade."
Yes, that happened in front of me at a shop making me parts. That was a brand new Makino.
Why don't they just upgrade them with Fanuc's CNC upgrade, where you get a nice screen and more precise controls for your old CNC machine? I don't understand why people still keep those old CNC's running DOS around when the upgrades aren't cost prohibitive anymore. More than likely you're going to have to gut and retrofit that CNC machine anyways, why not upgrade it?
Just look at Flight Simulator X and the amount of idiots that buy from PMDG, who require your real name, register you publicly on their website, and if you want to post on their forum, even to report a bug, you're required to provide your real name and credentials (Take about a complete farce to security and open den for identity thieves and the amount of idiots that defend their practice). If you post something bad about their product, you get banned forever.
HAM guys are no different, most of the stores are full of complete incompetent assholes, even HAM guys themselves know it. Letting them know they're incompetent assholes forces their hand to publicly denounce you, some will even refuse service to sell you anything afterwards.
I'm just glad China is killing all of their businesses and it's the one thing I'm grateful of China for doing, as much as they cry about it, their little cartel community is breaking apart when I can now freely buy radio equipment from Amazon and not from "Special" stores that want to run my life and determine what I'm allowed to have not allowed to have.
A lot of PLC software stopped working on Windows 10. Specifically Siemens Step software that just utterly pisses on you for trying (I don't know if they fixed it, I run it in vmware). So there's quite a few reasons why people will not install Windows 10. I've completely moved away from Windows.
"I do agree that small businesses should be subject to less regulation than the large multinationals though."
No, they shouldn't. As a small business owner myself, I have no problems with California regulations and I do give my employees lunch and breaks if they want too (Hell, some of them I have work from home now). The fact is, a lot of the big companies will follow most of California regulations to the letter because they don't have time to deal with all the liability if they don't. It's actually the damn small businesses that abuse the hell out of employees and don't follow the rules. As for costs, it's minuscule to follow for me because I actually know how to plan things for the long term and actually have procedures.
So, a good example of a small business is the building down from me, a paper converter. They don't follow any regulations, hire illegals to run their machines, abuse the hell out of their workers by overworking them over 12 hours a day (How do I know? They all come to my building looking for work telling me about this). So whenever I go to lunch with the owner, he bitches and moans about California laws everyday because he wants to pay his workers even less than minimum wage. Complains he has to pay overtime for his employees because he doesn't want to hire more people to deal with the overflow. Then he bitches and moans to me how he can't find any maintenance guy worth anything because he wants to pay them minimum wage and the guys he interviews laugh at him (Wants an engineer to work minimum wage or close to it). The guy has no permits, but plays the game with the city and OSHA like a flute. That is the small business you are talking about that you want to subject to less regulations. And this is actually very typical of every small business in California. Stop thinking that mom & pop shop is ethical, because this guy is a mom & pop shop, they're actually the worse.
And this isn't the only guy, I have a logistics company up the street from me doing the same thing, a screen printing business doing the same thing, and a company making spices doing the same thing.
And somehow I have no problem dealing with the regulations, but everyone else does! In my opinion, small businesses need to be subject to more regulations and scrutiny because they get away with so much, you wouldn't believe. If it was so bad in California, they would have moved out long ago.
Just go visit an ER room for work related injuries. You can see how if profit exceeds the cost of liability, a lot of shitty businesses really don't care if you lose a finger or hand, or arm, especially if you're a low tier worker. 20k settlement for the injured guy, replace the guy and change nothing. Rinse, repeat. No one cares that the guy is now physically disabled.
But Uber is right in this case, so they're not breaking any laws. Unless the state can vote in new laws, Uber is well within their rights to drive around with an autonomous vehicle. The state will have more luck having cities require permits for these vehicles, where the city council can vote in ordinances for such cases. This is most likely how it's going to end up, creating a nightmare of requiring permits and paying fees in every city to drive in them, thanks to Uber's assholish behavior.
This is quite similar to why I have to get permits to have my truck drive through certain areas due to assholes that ignored warnings from city officials from driving through their city with their overloaded broken trailers, destroying the roads, to avoid weight stations, ruining it for the rest of us that actually have legitimate reasons to drive there.
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So what? It's required in both the US and EU. I have to do it for my products, why does LG get a pass? I'm seeing too many Chinese products that don't have the FCC marking or if going to Europe, just falsely provide information about their EMI testing in their declaration, especially for LED lights which are starting to interfere with a great deal of stuff lately. There's a reason these rules are setup in the first place and it's to avoid a situation just like in the article.
I've switched my whole office to libreoffice. Also, a lot of businesses just run older versions of office. Why should they bother purchasing a new version of office that doesn't offer anything spectacular over the old version? Every business I go around too is running Office that is +5 years old, a lot still running Office 2003!
It sure is for China.
Avaya has been making horrible equipment, especially for IP phones. If you want to make equipment that's closed source, closed to literally everything, require purchasing licenses just to add an extra phone and is incompatible with everything (Left overs from the Nortel era), what do you expect? They are still popular in the used phone system market, since they work good enough, but you no longer have support for it, other than your phone guy. Want to add a phone? What a big headache... Their much touted scalability is quite a sham when it requires a team of people just to add phones.
Meanwhile, I bought my office Yealink IP phones and they work great and literally compatible with everything, SIP (of course), including adding address books, supports VPN connections and very easy to manage. They also look great, sound great and the color touch screen is a big plus. They're not exactly cheap either. Yealink also doesn't handcuff me with licensing, restrictions and fees. Works great with Asterisk and I can add as many damn phones as I please.
People still need these phones, they're not going away any time soon, unless cellphones start linking your business phone extension, but a lot of people don't like doing that either. Much of the telecomms business moved onto VOIP providers, IP phones that work and your local IT support.
Though, I did enjoy Sumatra on Windows, the problem for me and others is that all these PDF viewers, either in linux or Windows, they don't have a lot of the nice features that Adobe Acrobat has that are just convenient to use (They literally suck). Automatically OCR a document, multipage viewing that adjusts nicely to your screen, combine PDFs or whatever documents into one PDF, scanning, all the nice tools for review and note taking, etc. I had to sacrifice a lot of this nice convenience for my employees who were used to this. But I'm willing to burn it all down if it means stopping them from spying on my industry.
I would agree with you, but since buying an XPS 13 with linux running on it, I've been quite happy. I would have never thought of buying a Dell either, but I did and I've been happy with it.
I don't know why Arch isn't on this list either. It has a great package manager, a comprehensive wiki and if you want the latest and greatest, it's not a problem to get it.
Why not? I've been using it for my production server setup just fine. It works great and does the job pretty well. I don't recommend it for everyone, but the LTS and rolling updates doesn't hurt me. If it breaks something, that's why I have a backup to take over so I can figure it out.
To be honest, I haven't had anything break for my business for years on Arch. It's been running my machines, connecting to PLC's for data, running my database, all the good things just fine. I think probably the worst thing was just the python 2 to python 3 move, but it turned out to be a non-issue, since 90% of my stuff ran fine on python 3, and Arch (Along with all the major distributions) offered python 2 to stick around for a long time until I moved over.
I've already made that move. The only problem is that for me and you, it's not a big deal, for others it is difficult to get used too.
How does that relate to using your cellphone while driving?
It doesn't even matter if it's illegal. I still see people using their phones while driving, whether or not it's legal. The problem is that it's difficult for people to disconnect from their devices while driving. And adding silly prevention measures to keep the device from working while driving will only force people to find ways to circumvent them.
Short of shutting down the entire mobile network, the only real direction I see is to start looking to the future of automated vehicles and mandating automatic features for vehicles just like some insurance companies mandate you have to have your lights on all the time. Some of these things can already be implemented in a very cost effective way to even old vehicles like automatic braking to prevent accidents.
You're not going to rip these devices off of people since many of them depend on it for whatever reasons and they'll find some way of using it during their commute. Then you have the whole "hands free" debacle when devices have surpassed the "hands free" era, when they can skype, email, text, whatever. And most of the application developers have no desire of making their application hands free nor care.
Why is that? Somehow I can leave my money to someone else in a will, but I can't decide what to do with my organs after death?
Probably. That's why I went with a Dell. I never believed I'd buy a Dell before, but I don't regret it. It's been pretty good and they've been really linux friendly of late, even their support. I remember when I could load linux onto Thinkpads without much issues (I have an old one running Freebsd on one without issues), not anymore.
I don't. If they started the shareware model before all the downloading started, it might have worked. Now, I just don't even care to watch their movies even if it's offered for free. Even if they hand delivered it to me for free to watch, I still wouldn't watch it. They've pretty much destroyed my taste in all the movies they've been pumping out, most of it has been absolute crap. When you want me to pay $20 per a movie ticket to determine if a movie is crap, when the chances are very high that the movie is going to be crap, well, no thanks.
No, the best part is that every manufacturer saw that Jobs can get away with it, so can we. Ever since then, we've been having phones with degrading services requiring carriers to build more towers. But that's ok, because the carriers decided we could charge A LOT more for services because we have to build more towers, so now everyone is happy! Until the next BS to come up.
There are plenty of offline map services on Android and they're pretty decent, especially where I can actually turn off traffic alerts (Have it track me online) or not. What bothers me is that Google pretty much can access my phone whenever they want. Ever try logging into your account? Yeah, what you can do there, they can do more.
In the meantime, I'm sure we'll have alternatives. The end of Cyanogen is not the end of roms. XDA forums is still there and I'm pretty sure Cyanogen is already forked. Hell, actually, its already been forked with many other projects...
I always figured people that wanted thin would just get the Macbook Air. People buying Macbook Pro's expected to have a powerful laptop and don't care how thin it is.
Sounds similar to what Sony did a few years back with their Vaios. The laptops had serious issues with wifi connectivity and Sony would send people from Japan to investigate the situation. You would think they would be sending people to repair the problem and resolve the situation once and for all. Nope. You'd get a nice email about how you're at fault for everything. Meanwhile, people continued to have issues with the wifi connectivity.
Did they ever fix the issue or offer a resolution? Nope. The whole thing ended up being a PR stunt.
"They are? Why?"
Drives fail, it happens often in old CNC machines, and a good servo drive is going to cost you a huge chunk of change to replace (Since there is no support for them or warranty anymore). You might get lucky with some old guys that still fix them, but that line is thinning. It's 2017, I don't think you'll get much life out of that CNC machine you bought for 20k unless you retrofit it (You're really just driving until it breaks at this point). I used to play that game and found that it's not worth it, because it's going to break at the worst time possible. Getting parts for these ancient machines ends up being more of a chore and costing you more than a brand new machine or rebuilding it. Break that wonderful CRT touchscreen? There's a company on the east coast still making them for $10k each. Much cheaper to retrofit with new stuff instead.
Then you have permit issues of course, you have the requirement of having the panel listed. Most of these old CNC's are more likely from Japan (Kuraki, MoriSieki, most popular old brands at these auctions), are not listed. And OSHA's requirements (And most likely your insurance company too). Usually these retrofit companies will handle that.
You'd be surprised how much stuff can be gutted with the new controllers. You can take out that ancient computer running DOS that weighs a ton, with those ancient IO's (That nobody even knows what it does anymore) and replace it with something the size of a Raspberry Pi.
"There was a comment on the Windows 10 fiasco where one of their production machines was taken off line for a forced upgrade."
Yes, that happened in front of me at a shop making me parts. That was a brand new Makino.
Why don't they just upgrade them with Fanuc's CNC upgrade, where you get a nice screen and more precise controls for your old CNC machine? I don't understand why people still keep those old CNC's running DOS around when the upgrades aren't cost prohibitive anymore. More than likely you're going to have to gut and retrofit that CNC machine anyways, why not upgrade it?
It's not unbelievable, this is the attitude with a lot of proprietary HAM software and HAM stores selling devices. They're just straight up assholes.
Just look at Flight Simulator X and the amount of idiots that buy from PMDG, who require your real name, register you publicly on their website, and if you want to post on their forum, even to report a bug, you're required to provide your real name and credentials (Take about a complete farce to security and open den for identity thieves and the amount of idiots that defend their practice). If you post something bad about their product, you get banned forever.
HAM guys are no different, most of the stores are full of complete incompetent assholes, even HAM guys themselves know it. Letting them know they're incompetent assholes forces their hand to publicly denounce you, some will even refuse service to sell you anything afterwards.
I'm just glad China is killing all of their businesses and it's the one thing I'm grateful of China for doing, as much as they cry about it, their little cartel community is breaking apart when I can now freely buy radio equipment from Amazon and not from "Special" stores that want to run my life and determine what I'm allowed to have not allowed to have.
A lot of PLC software stopped working on Windows 10. Specifically Siemens Step software that just utterly pisses on you for trying (I don't know if they fixed it, I run it in vmware). So there's quite a few reasons why people will not install Windows 10. I've completely moved away from Windows.
"I do agree that small businesses should be subject to less regulation than the large multinationals though."
No, they shouldn't. As a small business owner myself, I have no problems with California regulations and I do give my employees lunch and breaks if they want too (Hell, some of them I have work from home now). The fact is, a lot of the big companies will follow most of California regulations to the letter because they don't have time to deal with all the liability if they don't. It's actually the damn small businesses that abuse the hell out of employees and don't follow the rules. As for costs, it's minuscule to follow for me because I actually know how to plan things for the long term and actually have procedures.
So, a good example of a small business is the building down from me, a paper converter. They don't follow any regulations, hire illegals to run their machines, abuse the hell out of their workers by overworking them over 12 hours a day (How do I know? They all come to my building looking for work telling me about this). So whenever I go to lunch with the owner, he bitches and moans about California laws everyday because he wants to pay his workers even less than minimum wage. Complains he has to pay overtime for his employees because he doesn't want to hire more people to deal with the overflow. Then he bitches and moans to me how he can't find any maintenance guy worth anything because he wants to pay them minimum wage and the guys he interviews laugh at him (Wants an engineer to work minimum wage or close to it). The guy has no permits, but plays the game with the city and OSHA like a flute. That is the small business you are talking about that you want to subject to less regulations. And this is actually very typical of every small business in California. Stop thinking that mom & pop shop is ethical, because this guy is a mom & pop shop, they're actually the worse.
And this isn't the only guy, I have a logistics company up the street from me doing the same thing, a screen printing business doing the same thing, and a company making spices doing the same thing.
And somehow I have no problem dealing with the regulations, but everyone else does! In my opinion, small businesses need to be subject to more regulations and scrutiny because they get away with so much, you wouldn't believe. If it was so bad in California, they would have moved out long ago.
Just go visit an ER room for work related injuries. You can see how if profit exceeds the cost of liability, a lot of shitty businesses really don't care if you lose a finger or hand, or arm, especially if you're a low tier worker. 20k settlement for the injured guy, replace the guy and change nothing. Rinse, repeat. No one cares that the guy is now physically disabled.
But Uber is right in this case, so they're not breaking any laws. Unless the state can vote in new laws, Uber is well within their rights to drive around with an autonomous vehicle. The state will have more luck having cities require permits for these vehicles, where the city council can vote in ordinances for such cases. This is most likely how it's going to end up, creating a nightmare of requiring permits and paying fees in every city to drive in them, thanks to Uber's assholish behavior.
This is quite similar to why I have to get permits to have my truck drive through certain areas due to assholes that ignored warnings from city officials from driving through their city with their overloaded broken trailers, destroying the roads, to avoid weight stations, ruining it for the rest of us that actually have legitimate reasons to drive there.