Sure, you've got to test for different markets (that was the whole Israeli thing a bit back on the ipad). That being said, I don't think I ever had a piece of equipment from the states that didn't run just fine on 220. What they ought to do is create treaties for standards for markets. Standardizing rules for markets on those things that reasonably can be (Cars, cell phones etc) would only increase consumer choice and reduce manufacturing costs.
What I don't get is the double standard some companies have on doing business in the US. Many of them state that the US is very expensive because of regulations we have for safety, environment and so on. If that is the case, than why is it almost always cheaper to buy such things in the states?
I've traveled overseas for work a few times and every time I did I absolutely avoided buying anything other than silly souvenirs because the cost differential was so great. The dollar may be at a historical low on the exchange rate, but it still doesn't come close to explaining the huge cost differentials.
Blame Startrek for making it look flawless. Speech recognition is just like fusion technology, 20 years away from properly working - just like it has been for the last 20 years.
-RANT- I cant stand voice recognition systems that don't at least give you an option to press a number. Especially when they are out of tune and pick up back ground noises as voice. Please, please, please - always give the option to press a number instead of having to voice everything!!
For their fight against Net Neutrality alone they deserve the worst company in America award. Anyone that fights against a principal freedom, and takes that freedom away from the public deserves to be held in contempt. No amount of customer service friendliness can ever undo that damage, and that's what Comcast just doesn't get.
You runs things in batches and you test against common builds. Most organizations have no need for more than a dozen common builds, even multinationals may only need 20. Every common build gets represented with a VM in the lab. Here's an example for a 15k manufacturing company that I helped set up their lab a few years back:
Engineer systems, Customer Service, Management, Accounting, Factory, Shipping, Developers, IT, HR, Legal and Office Workers. Each build had a certain set of software that was used by everyone that performed a given role (factory worker, engineer etc). Variances were required if someone needed software outside the common build, and granted as necessary. The idea is not to exclusively eliminate any possible risk, the idea is to mitigate the greatest amount of risk for a given reasonable work effort.
Each build was reflected with a corresponding VM in the lab. Whenever production code would go out the code would be submitted to the lab for pre-pilot testing. The code would be distributed to each of the common builds. Lab staff had the role of restoring VM's and setting up for the next step. Whoever wanted to implement the code would submit the code, change request and review the results. In the event of a critical piece of software an owner / advocate for that software was identified.
The change would be implemented in the lab and then undergo review by those with sign off authority. Advocates for specialized software knew that they needed to remote in and verify that nothing was out of place. In the events of patches a junior level security personnel would track all patches and see what was cleared, and where things broke. Part of their job was to make the patch exclusions, follow up with the vendors and ensure that any vulnerability was tracked until the software publisher resolved the patch problem.
None of this changes with anti-virus patching. You test updates each day by batch, once a day should be fine. Remember the idea is not check for every possible bad combination, the idea is to identify common, high visibility, financially or security sensitive scenarios and test against those. In the case of the McAfee debacle I take a hardline as even the most basic of testing would have discovered the error and prevented enterprise wide meltdowns. Look for your common use scenarios, insist on standard builds, do things in batches, identify owners and follow process. There is no reason you cannot test all production code and do so in a time expedient manner.
How much is your organizations downtime worth? When you have a computer go down, how much is the downtime for computer per hour? If that computer is in a factory your downtime could easily be in the ten's of thousands of dollars per hour. How much is your downtime for a financial computer worth? How much money does your call center lose per hour for downtime? Perhaps you don't care about how much money your company loses for downtime, but you might care about the workers who can no longer perform their job and get sent home early without pay?
I was a system admin for a fortune 50 company when the original Nimda virus struck. It took down one of the largest networks in the world and shut down operations on six continents. The cost of 48 hours of downtime to bring everything back up was internally estimated at over $100 million dollars. You don't need to be a fortune 50 company for the same principal to apply though. All you have do to do is compare the cost of a lab against the cost of downtime. In most environments the cost of a lab is dwarfed by the cost of downtime within a few hours.
Until you can answer the downtime for a given computer (or an enterprise of computers), you have no business judging that the cost of a lab is too much money. You lose power to a factory it shuts down one piece of your organization. You screw up with all your desktops and you shut down the entire enterprise. Do the math at your organization, tell me how much a lab and support costs would cost and then come back and tell me that a lab and testing aren't needed.
As a matter of fact I do expect that. I have designed and set up processes for patch management, software distribution and similar testing for large enterprise environments for years. I have done so everywhere from very large financial institutions to health-care and government. The fact that you need to test daily does not change any principal of what I have said. For any enterprise not to have a dedicated lab to do exactly this kind of testing, or ever worse, not to to use it is sheer and utter incompetence.
In no case should an automated update for an environment ever be released into production without testing. Even Microsoft gets this point and allows you to disable automatic patching to ensure that proper testing can be conducted. I'm not trying to sound harsh, but in all seriousness if you can't learn why testing/every/ production change is necessary from this debacle, than you do not belong in enterprise management. It really is that simple.
First, McAfee blew this big time, that such a bug made it to production shows a complete breakdown in their internal processes. XP with SP3 is the number one OS combination in enterprise environments, and should have been the first thing that they tested on. Without doubt McAfee has liability on this and needs to get aggressive about damage control with clients.
That being said, every one of these clients that was hit by this is just as guilty as McAfee is! They are in no better shape and those responsible need to be going management review for their failure. Enterprise Management 101 - nothing goes into production that has not been tested in a lab for pre-pilot and a small group of production computers for pilot! This is as basic as enterprise management gets. Every single environment that was taken down by this shows professional incompetence by their requisite IT departments.
The only question is if it is the fault of management for failing to allow the budget and support needed for a lab for testing or if it is the fault of the IT staffer who never tested things as they should. This is without doubt one of the most public examples of IT incompetence to make the news in years. This is a case of sheer and utter incompetence by every affected party and no pity should be given. If pity were to be given, give it to the poor desktop techs that have to go around making apologies and manual fixes for everything.
This is all meaningless, the factory will get slapped on the wrist, the workers will lose their jobs and microsoft will make a comment about taking such accusations 'seriously' and that they are 'investigating'. The public will be outraged for a month or two before forgetting which large corporation they are supposed to hate this month. Then the news media will go away and at the next contract renewal the whole job will get bid out again.
The reason it is meaningless is because the Chinese system of contract factories will at most simply shift the work to another factory - in China. The lax oversight, weak wages and rampant corruption in the system that allowed this kind of thing to happen in the first place remain. The only way to fix the issue is to stop production in China altogether and shift production to another country. That is the only thing that could possibly get the Chinese government to give a damn. Until companies start to shift work out of China and into a country that isn't inherently corrupt it just a game of whack a mole.
All that being said, the same factory, with the same management, employing the same people could still easily rebid and get the next contract simply by playing around with the paperwork on who owns the factory.
I remember years back being lured to a new job with one of the incentives being that the job included health insurance. Turned out that they 'had' it terms of it was offered, not included. It was an awful plan with no employer cost coverage. The cost for my family would have been a grand a month if I had paid for it.
I explained that I was one phone call from going back to where I came from and that the recruiters deceptive words were going to have a cost. In the end they ate the cost of the insurance, and I stayed where I was. Some people will bully you unless you stand up for yourself. All that being said, in today's economy I don't know if that is still good advice.
How about accountability in H1B with public records? That would solve this kind of problem for the poor guy who was owed so many back wages. Those in the states who are losing out to H1B's would better be able to make the case that their are Americans who can do the job. Those that do come over could avoid being turned into virtual slaves, I have met far too many H1B's who were worked 80 hours a week for wages less than half what an American would take. They would do it too, whether it was because their passport was confiscated or because such wages were still that much better than what they made at home.
The principal of what girlintraining said stands, if you want to solve the problem you have to follow the money. The fact that this would likely require international police cooperation to resolve is moot. Police agencies work together on this kind of crime on a routine basis, it's just a question of where the jurisdiction falls.
I used to work large balance fraud for a living, I could research a case, find the victim, find the perp, find all the aliases and their addresses, determine what was real, gain collaborating evidence from other fraud victim companies and be on the phone with the secret service with everything they needed to prosecute the case - and I typically did all of this in less than 15 minutes. While your chain of events isn't that far off, remember that for the people that solve this type of crime, it's what they do every single day.
For example many scams like this used to be initiated in Romania, and then Romanian authorities started cooperating with outside police agencies. It's a bit of a game of a whack-a-mole, as scam artists pick different host countries. All that being said, there's no voodoo in solving this type of crime, the only voodoo is working through jurisdictional issues.
The thing this person needs to do is report the crimes to the appropriate police agencies for their jurisdiction. They can then forward a copy of their police report to their former clients in an attempt to save their reputation. You gain points for trolling, but lose them for hyperbole.
Story #3 has already been used to great affect in the state of MN. Red Light cameras were declared illegal by the MN Supreme Court under that premise. I have a citation here for your reference.
I'm out for the night now, I will do more looking and follow up this weekend. One thing to start with is the harvard report another person already replied with. It's something I've studied for a while.
If your referring to social engineering is evil, than it is a matter of principal, as whoever has the most political clout starts forcing everyone else to live there life by a given social agenda. Social Engineering is when you use physical methodologies to enforce political ideals (automated speeding tickets, traffic circles and so on). History is rife with examples of people abusing political power and forcing others to a certain political view. Think of it as a freedom thing, doesn't matter the ideology of those in charge, anything can be abused.
If your talking about getting real, than it is a matter of perspective with people that have misplaced priorities. It's politically correct to hate on certain cars so people do it as a matter of groupthink. The desire for reduced pollution is good, however there are far more effective means of reducing pollution. Reducing the pollution put out by large sea going ships would have more real world affect than any level of change to cars ever could. Things like building nuclear power plants instead of coal easily outstrip the pollution a nation of cars could ever put out. People need to learn where pollution really comes from, follow the math, and you'll quickly see that energies have been misplaced from politically unpopular ideas to politically correct ideas such as the new fuel standards.
Reality check here for anonymous coward. The top 16 ships put out as much pollution as all of the worlds cars combined. Shipping is incredibly pollution heavy (I never said inefficient, read carefully next time) and cleaning that up would reap far more benefit for the environment than we could ever do by magically replaced every car on the planet with a prius.
I'm curious, what fraction of the problem do you think that is? I'll start you off with the following link for reference that talks about just the ships. Do the math, what fraction of the problem are cars? I'm trying to get people to have perspective on the issue. When 16 ships can emit as much pollution as every car on the planet, I'd say our priorities are misplaced. The goal of reduced pollution is not a bad goal, I'm no neocon. Do the fractions, factor in things like coal power plants (instead of nuclear) and put cars in perspective. The math should make priorities clear, even if those priorities are politically taboo.
Social engineering is evil, nothing to applaud here. Whilst increasing fuel economy is good, trying to force everyone to drive a small econobox is pure social engineering and nothing to be proud of. If you want to get real about this kind of thing go after large freighters and coal power plants.
If you want real change look at things like trying to clean up commercial trucking, or improving the economy of a garbage truck. Run the numbers and tell me what happens if you can improve the mileage of vehicles like garbage trucks. I'll give you a hint, most such trucks average between one and two mpg. If you want real progress mandate commercial trucks to start using hybrid technology and help the manufactures with the research costs. Companies like Mack don't want to get into Hyrbrids because the bodies are done by third parties and they worry about liability.
All said as someone who has historically owned small fuel efficient cars (Festiva, Accord, Saturn etc) and did so when gas was cheap and for years before it became the politically correct thing to do.
Chances are someone in the marketing department saw this and added 'syncing' of their own accord. They saw a buzzword, didn't know what they were talking about and made the ad accordingly. I doubt this was intentional fraud, and their answer sets the record straight on that. As one version of the old saying goes, "never attribute to malice that which is simple incompetence". Hopefully best buy will learn and have someone who is technically savvy review things in the future. After all who hasn't occasionally seen something like a dual core 2Ghz chip advertised as 4Ghz or a system advertised as having 1TB of memory?
Interesting point, you would need to find a way to notably increase the efficiency of cargo trains for a tunnel to pay out. Having been packed like a sardine on a 747 going across the Pacific, I don't find the idea of being packed like a sardine on a train any more appealing.
This would be big, but in practice how efficiently can it run with stops in every country desired by the host country?. I think they could build this, and potentially there are a lot of benefits from doing so. Certainly the Chinese have done well with rail in China by many measures. Fundamentally, this story is more about navigating bureaucracy (a triumph of it's own right) than any particular technical challenge.
I think the bigger news would be if they started work on a railway from China to the US. That would only need to pass through Russia on the way to the US (with Canada if they want direct to the lower 48). The number of negotiations would be much lower, and the ability to safely send cargo through a rail tunnel under the sea would be worth untold billions. Tunneling under the Bering Straight is technically feasible, just look at the Chunnel and other such projects. It's slashdot, give us technical challenges, not bureaucratic ones!
chances are that newegg was similiarly duped, if they did this deliberately the cost to their business would be unrecoverable. went through something like this years ago with fake maxtor hard drives. turned out someone at the factory got a bunch of rejects, sent them to a shop and they had there firmware crudely rewritten along with professional labels. that is someone from the Western Digital factory.
Maxtor worked with me on it and they were able to tell by the circuit board who really made the hard drives. if memory serves they came from provantage and once I got provantage involved they replaced the entire lot of hard drives.
This guy sounds out of touch, like he is more concerned with the politics of appeasing China than the job of securing our country. Can we somehow get this guy removed from office for incompetence?
The first thing you need to learn, that your slowly starting to learn, is that your user base can't be bothered. If they click a button and the error message goes away than they consider their problem gone. Unless they can no longer use their needed application, they will not both bother to call it in.
Look at the user experience for someone who does have to call it in. In many companies this means a call to a helpdesk in India, an aggravating set of phone menus and an unpleasant conversation. However if they just click the button, use task manager or reboot than they have 'solved' their problem themselves.
What you need to do is to adapt to your users instead of trying to get your users to adapt to you. Set up software on their computer that monitors for certain error codes. You can fairly easily set up different tools to look in the log files for certain events and than do something about it. That something could be as simple as a timestamp, taking a screenshot, recording all open applications and services and sending a notification to your helpdesk with the requisite log file.
Short of using something like another commentator said about disabling the users ability to do anything other than to report by using penalties, there isn't anything you can do get a user to report because the bottom line is that they can't be bothered.
Think of this a few different ways. First from a liability standpoint, you are considering actively refusing a fix for a known bug that has killed people. If you ever sell your car and it can be proved you actively refused this you could be on the hook both civilly and criminally. Second from a liability standpoint, Toyota is now assuming liability for this, if they brick your car, they are liable for fixing it. Third, this is a known bug that has killed people, are you bloody nuts? This is not a software bug that results in a software crash, this is a software bug that results in a real world crash!
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, you've got to test for different markets (that was the whole Israeli thing a bit back on the ipad). That being said, I don't think I ever had a piece of equipment from the states that didn't run just fine on 220. What they ought to do is create treaties for standards for markets. Standardizing rules for markets on those things that reasonably can be (Cars, cell phones etc) would only increase consumer choice and reduce manufacturing costs.
What I don't get is the double standard some companies have on doing business in the US. Many of them state that the US is very expensive because of regulations we have for safety, environment and so on. If that is the case, than why is it almost always cheaper to buy such things in the states?
I've traveled overseas for work a few times and every time I did I absolutely avoided buying anything other than silly souvenirs because the cost differential was so great. The dollar may be at a historical low on the exchange rate, but it still doesn't come close to explaining the huge cost differentials.
Blame Startrek for making it look flawless. Speech recognition is just like fusion technology, 20 years away from properly working - just like it has been for the last 20 years.
-RANT- I cant stand voice recognition systems that don't at least give you an option to press a number. Especially when they are out of tune and pick up back ground noises as voice. Please, please, please - always give the option to press a number instead of having to voice everything!!
For their fight against Net Neutrality alone they deserve the worst company in America award. Anyone that fights against a principal freedom, and takes that freedom away from the public deserves to be held in contempt. No amount of customer service friendliness can ever undo that damage, and that's what Comcast just doesn't get.
You runs things in batches and you test against common builds. Most organizations have no need for more than a dozen common builds, even multinationals may only need 20. Every common build gets represented with a VM in the lab. Here's an example for a 15k manufacturing company that I helped set up their lab a few years back:
Engineer systems, Customer Service, Management, Accounting, Factory, Shipping, Developers, IT, HR, Legal and Office Workers. Each build had a certain set of software that was used by everyone that performed a given role (factory worker, engineer etc). Variances were required if someone needed software outside the common build, and granted as necessary. The idea is not to exclusively eliminate any possible risk, the idea is to mitigate the greatest amount of risk for a given reasonable work effort.
Each build was reflected with a corresponding VM in the lab. Whenever production code would go out the code would be submitted to the lab for pre-pilot testing. The code would be distributed to each of the common builds. Lab staff had the role of restoring VM's and setting up for the next step. Whoever wanted to implement the code would submit the code, change request and review the results. In the event of a critical piece of software an owner / advocate for that software was identified.
The change would be implemented in the lab and then undergo review by those with sign off authority. Advocates for specialized software knew that they needed to remote in and verify that nothing was out of place. In the events of patches a junior level security personnel would track all patches and see what was cleared, and where things broke. Part of their job was to make the patch exclusions, follow up with the vendors and ensure that any vulnerability was tracked until the software publisher resolved the patch problem.
None of this changes with anti-virus patching. You test updates each day by batch, once a day should be fine. Remember the idea is not check for every possible bad combination, the idea is to identify common, high visibility, financially or security sensitive scenarios and test against those. In the case of the McAfee debacle I take a hardline as even the most basic of testing would have discovered the error and prevented enterprise wide meltdowns. Look for your common use scenarios, insist on standard builds, do things in batches, identify owners and follow process. There is no reason you cannot test all production code and do so in a time expedient manner.
How much is your organizations downtime worth? When you have a computer go down, how much is the downtime for computer per hour? If that computer is in a factory your downtime could easily be in the ten's of thousands of dollars per hour. How much is your downtime for a financial computer worth? How much money does your call center lose per hour for downtime? Perhaps you don't care about how much money your company loses for downtime, but you might care about the workers who can no longer perform their job and get sent home early without pay?
I was a system admin for a fortune 50 company when the original Nimda virus struck. It took down one of the largest networks in the world and shut down operations on six continents. The cost of 48 hours of downtime to bring everything back up was internally estimated at over $100 million dollars. You don't need to be a fortune 50 company for the same principal to apply though. All you have do to do is compare the cost of a lab against the cost of downtime. In most environments the cost of a lab is dwarfed by the cost of downtime within a few hours.
Until you can answer the downtime for a given computer (or an enterprise of computers), you have no business judging that the cost of a lab is too much money. You lose power to a factory it shuts down one piece of your organization. You screw up with all your desktops and you shut down the entire enterprise. Do the math at your organization, tell me how much a lab and support costs would cost and then come back and tell me that a lab and testing aren't needed.
As a matter of fact I do expect that. I have designed and set up processes for patch management, software distribution and similar testing for large enterprise environments for years. I have done so everywhere from very large financial institutions to health-care and government. The fact that you need to test daily does not change any principal of what I have said. For any enterprise not to have a dedicated lab to do exactly this kind of testing, or ever worse, not to to use it is sheer and utter incompetence.
In no case should an automated update for an environment ever be released into production without testing. Even Microsoft gets this point and allows you to disable automatic patching to ensure that proper testing can be conducted. I'm not trying to sound harsh, but in all seriousness if you can't learn why testing /every/ production change is necessary from this debacle, than you do not belong in enterprise management. It really is that simple.
First, McAfee blew this big time, that such a bug made it to production shows a complete breakdown in their internal processes. XP with SP3 is the number one OS combination in enterprise environments, and should have been the first thing that they tested on. Without doubt McAfee has liability on this and needs to get aggressive about damage control with clients.
That being said, every one of these clients that was hit by this is just as guilty as McAfee is! They are in no better shape and those responsible need to be going management review for their failure. Enterprise Management 101 - nothing goes into production that has not been tested in a lab for pre-pilot and a small group of production computers for pilot! This is as basic as enterprise management gets. Every single environment that was taken down by this shows professional incompetence by their requisite IT departments.
The only question is if it is the fault of management for failing to allow the budget and support needed for a lab for testing or if it is the fault of the IT staffer who never tested things as they should. This is without doubt one of the most public examples of IT incompetence to make the news in years. This is a case of sheer and utter incompetence by every affected party and no pity should be given. If pity were to be given, give it to the poor desktop techs that have to go around making apologies and manual fixes for everything.
This is all meaningless, the factory will get slapped on the wrist, the workers will lose their jobs and microsoft will make a comment about taking such accusations 'seriously' and that they are 'investigating'. The public will be outraged for a month or two before forgetting which large corporation they are supposed to hate this month. Then the news media will go away and at the next contract renewal the whole job will get bid out again.
The reason it is meaningless is because the Chinese system of contract factories will at most simply shift the work to another factory - in China. The lax oversight, weak wages and rampant corruption in the system that allowed this kind of thing to happen in the first place remain. The only way to fix the issue is to stop production in China altogether and shift production to another country. That is the only thing that could possibly get the Chinese government to give a damn. Until companies start to shift work out of China and into a country that isn't inherently corrupt it just a game of whack a mole.
All that being said, the same factory, with the same management, employing the same people could still easily rebid and get the next contract simply by playing around with the paperwork on who owns the factory.
I remember years back being lured to a new job with one of the incentives being that the job included health insurance. Turned out that they 'had' it terms of it was offered, not included. It was an awful plan with no employer cost coverage. The cost for my family would have been a grand a month if I had paid for it.
I explained that I was one phone call from going back to where I came from and that the recruiters deceptive words were going to have a cost. In the end they ate the cost of the insurance, and I stayed where I was. Some people will bully you unless you stand up for yourself. All that being said, in today's economy I don't know if that is still good advice.
How about accountability in H1B with public records? That would solve this kind of problem for the poor guy who was owed so many back wages. Those in the states who are losing out to H1B's would better be able to make the case that their are Americans who can do the job. Those that do come over could avoid being turned into virtual slaves, I have met far too many H1B's who were worked 80 hours a week for wages less than half what an American would take. They would do it too, whether it was because their passport was confiscated or because such wages were still that much better than what they made at home.
The principal of what girlintraining said stands, if you want to solve the problem you have to follow the money. The fact that this would likely require international police cooperation to resolve is moot. Police agencies work together on this kind of crime on a routine basis, it's just a question of where the jurisdiction falls.
I used to work large balance fraud for a living, I could research a case, find the victim, find the perp, find all the aliases and their addresses, determine what was real, gain collaborating evidence from other fraud victim companies and be on the phone with the secret service with everything they needed to prosecute the case - and I typically did all of this in less than 15 minutes. While your chain of events isn't that far off, remember that for the people that solve this type of crime, it's what they do every single day.
For example many scams like this used to be initiated in Romania, and then Romanian authorities started cooperating with outside police agencies. It's a bit of a game of a whack-a-mole, as scam artists pick different host countries. All that being said, there's no voodoo in solving this type of crime, the only voodoo is working through jurisdictional issues.
The thing this person needs to do is report the crimes to the appropriate police agencies for their jurisdiction. They can then forward a copy of their police report to their former clients in an attempt to save their reputation. You gain points for trolling, but lose them for hyperbole.
Story #3 has already been used to great affect in the state of MN. Red Light cameras were declared illegal by the MN Supreme Court under that premise. I have a citation here for your reference.
I'm out for the night now, I will do more looking and follow up this weekend. One thing to start with is the harvard report another person already replied with. It's something I've studied for a while.
Couple of reasons for my statements.
If your referring to social engineering is evil, than it is a matter of principal, as whoever has the most political clout starts forcing everyone else to live there life by a given social agenda. Social Engineering is when you use physical methodologies to enforce political ideals (automated speeding tickets, traffic circles and so on). History is rife with examples of people abusing political power and forcing others to a certain political view. Think of it as a freedom thing, doesn't matter the ideology of those in charge, anything can be abused.
If your talking about getting real, than it is a matter of perspective with people that have misplaced priorities. It's politically correct to hate on certain cars so people do it as a matter of groupthink. The desire for reduced pollution is good, however there are far more effective means of reducing pollution. Reducing the pollution put out by large sea going ships would have more real world affect than any level of change to cars ever could. Things like building nuclear power plants instead of coal easily outstrip the pollution a nation of cars could ever put out. People need to learn where pollution really comes from, follow the math, and you'll quickly see that energies have been misplaced from politically unpopular ideas to politically correct ideas such as the new fuel standards.
Thank you for the polite discourse. I have downloaded the report and will be reading this soon.
Reality check here for anonymous coward. The top 16 ships put out as much pollution as all of the worlds cars combined. Shipping is incredibly pollution heavy (I never said inefficient, read carefully next time) and cleaning that up would reap far more benefit for the environment than we could ever do by magically replaced every car on the planet with a prius.
I'm curious, what fraction of the problem do you think that is? I'll start you off with the following link for reference that talks about just the ships. Do the math, what fraction of the problem are cars? I'm trying to get people to have perspective on the issue. When 16 ships can emit as much pollution as every car on the planet, I'd say our priorities are misplaced. The goal of reduced pollution is not a bad goal, I'm no neocon. Do the fractions, factor in things like coal power plants (instead of nuclear) and put cars in perspective. The math should make priorities clear, even if those priorities are politically taboo.
Social engineering is evil, nothing to applaud here. Whilst increasing fuel economy is good, trying to force everyone to drive a small econobox is pure social engineering and nothing to be proud of. If you want to get real about this kind of thing go after large freighters and coal power plants.
If you want real change look at things like trying to clean up commercial trucking, or improving the economy of a garbage truck. Run the numbers and tell me what happens if you can improve the mileage of vehicles like garbage trucks. I'll give you a hint, most such trucks average between one and two mpg. If you want real progress mandate commercial trucks to start using hybrid technology and help the manufactures with the research costs. Companies like Mack don't want to get into Hyrbrids because the bodies are done by third parties and they worry about liability.
All said as someone who has historically owned small fuel efficient cars (Festiva, Accord, Saturn etc) and did so when gas was cheap and for years before it became the politically correct thing to do.
Chances are someone in the marketing department saw this and added 'syncing' of their own accord. They saw a buzzword, didn't know what they were talking about and made the ad accordingly. I doubt this was intentional fraud, and their answer sets the record straight on that. As one version of the old saying goes, "never attribute to malice that which is simple incompetence". Hopefully best buy will learn and have someone who is technically savvy review things in the future. After all who hasn't occasionally seen something like a dual core 2Ghz chip advertised as 4Ghz or a system advertised as having 1TB of memory?
Interesting point, you would need to find a way to notably increase the efficiency of cargo trains for a tunnel to pay out. Having been packed like a sardine on a 747 going across the Pacific, I don't find the idea of being packed like a sardine on a train any more appealing.
This would be big, but in practice how efficiently can it run with stops in every country desired by the host country?. I think they could build this, and potentially there are a lot of benefits from doing so. Certainly the Chinese have done well with rail in China by many measures. Fundamentally, this story is more about navigating bureaucracy (a triumph of it's own right) than any particular technical challenge.
I think the bigger news would be if they started work on a railway from China to the US. That would only need to pass through Russia on the way to the US (with Canada if they want direct to the lower 48). The number of negotiations would be much lower, and the ability to safely send cargo through a rail tunnel under the sea would be worth untold billions. Tunneling under the Bering Straight is technically feasible, just look at the Chunnel and other such projects. It's slashdot, give us technical challenges, not bureaucratic ones!
chances are that newegg was similiarly duped, if they did this deliberately the cost to their business would be unrecoverable. went through something like this years ago with fake maxtor hard drives. turned out someone at the factory got a bunch of rejects, sent them to a shop and they had there firmware crudely rewritten along with professional labels. that is someone from the Western Digital factory.
Maxtor worked with me on it and they were able to tell by the circuit board who really made the hard drives. if memory serves they came from provantage and once I got provantage involved they replaced the entire lot of hard drives.
This guy sounds out of touch, like he is more concerned with the politics of appeasing China than the job of securing our country. Can we somehow get this guy removed from office for incompetence?
The first thing you need to learn, that your slowly starting to learn, is that your user base can't be bothered. If they click a button and the error message goes away than they consider their problem gone. Unless they can no longer use their needed application, they will not both bother to call it in.
Look at the user experience for someone who does have to call it in. In many companies this means a call to a helpdesk in India, an aggravating set of phone menus and an unpleasant conversation. However if they just click the button, use task manager or reboot than they have 'solved' their problem themselves.
What you need to do is to adapt to your users instead of trying to get your users to adapt to you. Set up software on their computer that monitors for certain error codes. You can fairly easily set up different tools to look in the log files for certain events and than do something about it. That something could be as simple as a timestamp, taking a screenshot, recording all open applications and services and sending a notification to your helpdesk with the requisite log file.
Short of using something like another commentator said about disabling the users ability to do anything other than to report by using penalties, there isn't anything you can do get a user to report because the bottom line is that they can't be bothered.
Think of this a few different ways. First from a liability standpoint, you are considering actively refusing a fix for a known bug that has killed people. If you ever sell your car and it can be proved you actively refused this you could be on the hook both civilly and criminally. Second from a liability standpoint, Toyota is now assuming liability for this, if they brick your car, they are liable for fixing it. Third, this is a known bug that has killed people, are you bloody nuts? This is not a software bug that results in a software crash, this is a software bug that results in a real world crash!