If the people putzing around with 60GHz systems ever make it out of the embryonic phase('WirelessHD' has actually shipped a handful of devices; but is a likely proprietary dead-end; the 'Wireless Gigabit Alliance' as an insufferably stupid name and little or nothing you can actually buy; but has the support of the Wifi people and thus some hope of being a useful short-range-but-very-fast interoperable addition to 2.4 and 5 GHz networking), this kid is really going to have a bad time...
It's actually an immune response to 802.11 frames, not microwaves per se. The best way to confirm the diagnosis is to obtain some of the old pre-802.11b era gear, from when the spec still defined an IR physical layer. Then you can completely remove RF from the test environment; but still expose the subject to 802.11 frames.
Alas, finding Spectrix Inc. networking gear is pretty damn tricky these days, so it's a difficult test to perform.
For ADA purposes, the limitations imposed by the effects of an illness, or the treatment requirements of one, count as 'disabilities'(eg. unless you can prove that it would cause 'undue hardship', you would need to allow a diabetic some breaks to test blood sugar and administer insulin, if needed).
You do have to have a disability, and you can't just self-diagnose(it would be interesting to see what the court thinks of the quack who did the diagnosing in this case); but the law covers basically any functional impairment, if it can be overcome with a 'reasonable accommodation' and without 'undue hardship'. A limb stump or guide dog makes things nice and obvious; but any medical issue potentially qualifies if it has functional impact.
I suspect that if the school is just running wifi to save on cabling costs and to allow students and staff to screw around on their phones; they might have an ADA problem. Not because kiddo is actually sensitive to 802.11-compliant microwave chatter; but because kiddo has some sort of actual psych issue that can be mitigated just by turning some APs off.
However, if the school has introduced assorted mobile devices into their curriculum(which wouldn't be a surprise, ipads are a huge craze in education, and Fay certainly has the cash for it); the case might really hit the rocks on 'undue hardship' because the accommodation would require forcing the school to use a less-optimal curriculum, without any devices that cannot be hardwired or situations where hardwired devices aren't practical, for all the students who share a class with this kid(and, unless their IT office is good at toggling POE ports, potentially all students who share a classroom with this kid). That's the sort of disruption of how things are done that goes beyond mere money or inconvenience. It also(unlike added aids, braille texts, audio amplification, screen readers, magnification devices, and so on) isn't something that you can just get the affected kid, it's something you have to take away from everyone else.
In this case, it isn't even a school board, it's a private school's admin, so it is likely to be even less their problem. A public school district is legally obligated to deal with basically whatever the residents of the area spawn; either in-house or by paying for an appropriate specialist placement(I think that kiddo going to jail makes him not their problem anymore; but if so that's about it).
A private school has no particular obligation to deal with anyone in particular; so long as they don't explicitly step on some protected class or (as is being argued in this case) fail to make reasonable accommodation per the ADA.
If it were a public school, it would be the school's problem, just as they have to make provision for the education of any other sickie(mental or physical); but for the private school to be obligated; it has to be demonstrated that kiddo has a 'disability' for ADA purposes, that they are capable of performing if provided with 'reasonable accommodation', and that the 'reasonable accommodation' would not cause 'undue hardship' for the entity being asked to provide it.
I'd be interested to know how the meaning of those terms would be decided in this case. Fay is a pretty fancy school, east coast private boarding school with history dating back before 1900 and its own endowment and all; but even if that mitigates any argument about the financial impact of having to hardwire everything, it might well be argued that, say, making it impossible for anyone in this kid's class to do an ipad-related curriculum activity would impose excessive limitations on their ability to learn, and the school to teach, as it usually does. If the school were purely doing wireless because it was cheaper, they might have issues; but today wireless devices are used routinely in situations where hardwired stuff would never have been considered practical; plus(unlike an accommodation that requires adding something, like a braille copy of the textbook or the like, the accomodation here demanded requires depriving everyone in the student's proximity of any use of wifi devices, or segregating the student, neither of which are likely to go over all that well.)
It sounds like a quip; but it's the truth: more redundancy. Nothing is going to allow a system(whether it is all handled by the filesystem or the work is divided between a RAID controller and a filesystem) to recover a chunk of data that the universe violently removes except another copy of that data or something from which it can be deterministically inferred(even if you accept the 'random number generator and a lot of patience' mode of data recovery, you still need to know when you've recovered the correct data).
If you have a full proof of the behavior of the system, you can at least know what sorts of failures, and where, will cause loss, and of what; but any real-world implementation is going to ultimately rest on a judgement about acceptable risk vs. acceptable cost of redundant hardware. Had the system in your post been running 5 disks in RAID1, it would have been totally fine with the loss of up to 4 disks; but not terribly efficient. Elegant math can make detecting errors more likely, allow for redundancy that is more efficient than naive copying, provide insight into what steps in the process are points of failure, how severe they are, and so on; but unless you have an ideal computer to run it on, it will be a matter of some degree of chance, though ideally a well understood degree knowingly chosen.
This seems particularly absurd given that the point in question was 'not believing that World War Three is winnable'.
It takes pretty impressive doublethink to suggest that pessimism about a hypothetical nuclear exchange that the government's own strategists were talking about in terms of 'mutually assured destruction' and 'deterrence' is somehow a product of propaganda.
I apologize if I was unclear: my intent with that was to note that 'unprecedented-and-cool' is one virtue that a space project can have, with scientific utility being another, economic value another, defense/intelligence applications, another, and so on. 'Unprecedented-and-cool' isn't terribly high on the hierarchy of virtues, certainly not worth sacrificing real science for; but at least it is something. My point was that, in addition to substantial deficiencies in scientific value, economic utility, etc. it doesn't even have the compensatory value of being really cool. It doesn't tick any of the boxes nearly as well as one would want for how much it costs, not even coolness, much less actually useful virtues.
If it has video-in and supports being used as a touchscreen monitor, it might actually be quite competitive; just not as a tablet.
For whatever reasons of history and economies of scale, touchscreen monitors are painfully expensive(awful crap starts at ~$200 and people are still selling 15 inch units with resistive sensors for $300 and up with a straight face, presumably because everything about the 'point of sale' market sucks). Assuming that this device is well-built enough to survive as a tablet, it'll be more rugged than most touchscreen monitors on the low end; and quite possibly have better panel quality, since tablets usually need displays good enough that rotating them won't cause viewing angle issues.
I, thankfully, am not among the lost and the damned who actually need touchscreen monitors, much less rugged ones; but if I were I'd be looking at this with some interest(if video-in is available). Unless Samsung gets too optimistic about the price, this might well stack up quite favorably even if you ignore the internal computer capabilities entirely.
Truly, the ISS is the gem of human scientific endeavor in space. Was that actually the most interesting microgravity experiment that anyone could think of to fill that chunk of payload space; or are they trying to land some corporate sponsors?
There was a time I understood this during the PPC era of mac, but now that macs run on commodity, non specialized CISC based x86, I have no idea why they retain their value. A lot of PC makers are starting to make machines that look *almost* as nice as a MBP. My HP Envy Beats laptops have a nice aluminum case.
What I don't understand about the 'macs retain their value!' thing is not the hardware side(macs indeed tend to have excellent build quality and, unless one of the specific cursed models, reliability); but the fact that the OSX upgrade pace is so ruthless; and Apple has so many of the 3rd party developers onboard.
An older PC may be a piece of shit held together with spit and duct tape; but whiny corporate customers and driver releases from assorted device and chip vendors mean that even surprisingly ancient PC hardware can be upgraded long, long, after it was made(though it'll probably need more RAM if you want to enjoy the process). Plus, while running an OS that doesn't get security patches anymore is insane, 3rd party vendors tend to support OSes 1 or 2, sometimes more, versions behind the latest release, so the only programs that effectively exclude old hardware are the ones that simply demand too much power.
OSX goes through versions swiftly, leaves models in its wake without mercy; and 3rd party vendors are usually pretty quick to also move to the new-and-shiny OS version, with support for users of older OSes confined to making old versions of their products available, if that.
That is what puzzles me: The mac is likely to be in excellent physical condition after all those years; but it will be much closer to being stricken from the OSX upgrades list; and once that happens 3rd party support also dwindles pretty quickly. That would seem to cut a lot of the value off, unless you have a particular legacy app you need to support; or are planning on bootcamping/running Linux anyway.
I, thankfully, am in the 'Windows 10? Why there are years left on our Win7 support!' boat at work; but the one major inducement, if you happen to be stuck with any, is some of the hardware that shipped with Win8 or 8.1: Some perfectly normal, also-supports-win7-at-least-if-purchased-as-a-business-customer, hardware was crippled with Win8; but there were also a lot of tablet and tablet-ish things that came out of Intel's "Let's sell Bay Trail Atoms for negative amounts of money because ARM is starting to scare us" campaign.
Win10 is very arguably a substantial improvement over Win8; and that class of devices is never going to get Win7 support. Those were the systems where storage was often eMMC rather than PATA/SATA, a nontrivial number of peripherals were not on the PCI root at all, and various other oddities that freak Win7 out. If you have those; Win10 is starting to look a lot more attractive than Win8/8.1
If you have more normal PC-compatible gear, the prospect is less exciting.
Given Apple's giant pile of money, I can't argue that they are making a mistake; but it's never been news that desktops are the segment that they can barely bring themselves to care about; much less actively attempt to engage potential new customers(even more now that iDevices are a viable 'gateway' purchase; and desktop market share is being eaten by laptops even among PCs).
If Apple gave a damn, the mythical mac min-tower would exist; and it'd be possible to buy something that costs somewhere between a mini and an imac; but has at least one PCIe x16 slot and maybe even some space for hard drives. It doesn't; and really never has, unless you count the runt-of-the-litter single socket workstations, which were that expandable; but pricier.
If you are in this market, Apple has nothing to offer you, and it appears that they like it that way.
For the purposes of pro-Linux bigotry the big letdown of Apple hardware(the x86 stuff, the big letdown of the ARM based stuff is obvious); is the firmware. The situation is slightly improved by the fact that there aren't too many variants to target, and macs are popular with software developers; but Apple's interpretation of EFI is weirder, if perhaps more competent, than even the horrible people on the PC side.
Was an SSD involved? Unless you are really scraping the bottom of the barrel, or running something brutal, it's tricky to under-buy on CPUs; and even the RAM situation isn't as bad as it used to be(you still probably want to double what the base model has; but back in the bad old days you effectively needed to double and probably wanted to quadruple what the base model has); but the difference between systems running from HDDs and systems running from SSDs is a pretty dramatic jump.
The corporate market is actually relatively intolerant of failure; and to the degree that it is tolerant, demands that swift repair or replacement be at least available as an option. This has the downside of often creating oddballs that are a real pain if you don't have warranty service, since they are composed entirely of proprietary FRUs with no availability beyond assorted secondary market refurb slingers; but when they are under warranty the expectation is that isolating the faulty part will be fast, a replacement should be on the Fedex truck as fast as possible, and physically swapping it out will be minimally fussy and ideally toolless. Not all models achieve this ideal, and there have been some notorious ones over the years; but neither the customer nor the vendor is at all happy in those situations. The customer deals with a lot of downtime; the vendor has a large number of customers with fancy warranties, so if their parts are crap actually honoring those warranties can get very expensive, very fast(even if the replacement parts were free, the shipping alone will erase your profit on the sale of the unit pretty quickly).
Apple is actually an interesting sort of middle ground. They refuse to sell the real low-cost crap, and so are largely spared the "well of course it broke within 18 months; because we had to squeeze the BOM until it bled in order to get you to buy it, rather than the other guy's one that cost $5 less" problems. They also offer the best in-person support around(if you are suitably close to one of their retail locations). Other consumer brands are usually restricted to mail-in service from the vendor, or the painfully uneven and often horrific world of 3rd party support(some of which is excellent; but much of which is the geek squad). However, their gear is not exactly built with serviceability in mind; and they aren't terribly aggressive about very fast turnaround, on site tech visits, or other (costly; but available with the fancy warranty) corporate-market services.
It's easy to see why they are so popular in the consumer market; they've done a great job of forcing users to buy the computer that they actually want, rather than picking the price tag that they think they want; and offer better support than most vendors' consumer-grade lines; but they definitely won't coddle you the way an enterprise vendor with whom you have a suitably nice warranty agreement will.
Where did you get the impression that the charge was 'insufficent coolness'? The charge is 'poor science/cost ratio; maintained at the expense of other possible projects.'
Manned space activity is actually very, very, good at generating coolness. Possibly too good, when it comes to adjusting the allocation of resources to various projects.
The ISS has zero lift capacity; but it demands considerable lift capacity to keep it supplied with rotating crew, their consumables, and assorted bits and pieces. Plus the launch of the original modules. That's the 'per unit lift capacity' I'm referring to. We have transported a considerable amount of mass into orbit to have the ISS. Does it compare favorably to other missions that could have been performed with those resources?
Please do correct me if I'm factually misinformed; but my impression is that 'saving the ISS' isn't exactly a noble cause when it comes to actually doing [i]science[/i] in and about space.
I'm personally very much in favor of NASA's role in aeronautics and space R&D(both the necessary delivery systems and the cool exploratory robots we have probing various bits of the solar system and the assorted satellites focused on earth-surface observation and astronomy work that the atmosphere would interfere with); but the ISS seems like the very worst flavor of man-in-a-can makework nonsense. It doesn't even have the cool-and-unprecedented factor of the sending-men-to-the-moon projects; but it consumes a lot of orbital lift capacity to send a rotating crew of humans; and the supplies to support them to a motly collection of hamster tubes in an orbit so low it barely counts as out of the atmosphere.
Is there any serious defense of the ISS in terms of a results per unit spend or unit lift capacity? It's neat, and it has podcasts, and such; but it had better be a lot of neat to justify all the possible 'send robotic probe to do something' or 'assemble larger telescope in orbit' or other projects that could have been done instead.
As much as 'Linux' keeps being dragged into assorted rambling-think-pieces as though it were a direct analog to the OS-and-also-a-big-suite-of-hardware-software-and-'cloud'-service-offerings referred to as 'Windows' and 'Apple' or 'OSX'; 'Linux', so far as it is Linus' problem, is a kernel. It's also a kernel that has succeeded largely on the basis of being widely supported, reasonably flexible(with greater flexibility available to those willing to do additional heavy lifting themselves), and an inexpensive implementation of mostly-unix-like behavior.
That's not a role 100% free of strategic considerations(like the current 'beating on the ARM vendors to un-fuck the current fragmented hellhole of disjointed BSPs and embrace sanity' initiative); but it is one where "ensure continued cooperation among interested users and hardware vendors, integrate promising out-of-tree developments as demand and maturity suggest" is more or less the best strategy to take. It's not as though it would even be meaningful for an OS to "Embrace a cloud services strategy", since that happens at a different level of the stack entirely; and to the degree that OS development does need, and do, blue-sky cool-new-architecture-from-the-ground-up; that isn't exactly mainline Linux's problem; and Linux probably isn't even an obvious starting point(if your bold new OS concept makes use of some sort of exotic hardware capabilities, you'll presumably be prototyping on FPGAs or the ASICs you are developing in tandem with the OS; if it is designed to work with mostly standard hardware; but do some part of being an OS differently, you can develop against a delightfully small and stable collection of 'hardware' thanks to VMs.
I might actually vote for him because of this policy. Never thought I would say that.
I'd be inclined to see whether his various business ventures have exhibited this sort of hiring policy; or whether he's a "Buy American!" sort of guy when looking for votes; and a buy Mexican sort of guy when looking for labor...
His willingness to play the overt nativist is useful in that it may help force the Republicans to quit equivocating on whether they feel like serving their plutocratic wing's enthusiasm for cheap labor or their working class wing's desire to not be reduced to squalor and/or surrounded by filthy foreign hordes; but I wouldn't necessarily mistake it for honesty.
It isn't "naïveté", it's an active policy. We are familiar with foreign corrupt practices; and duly enacted the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act(unfortunately, there is no Domestic Corrupt Practices Act, so a major loophole remains unfilled). The act allows for certain exceptions; but is largely intended to prevent US companies and persons contributing to further corruption in assorted already-corrupt locations.
That just makes it worse: telling someone that they made a mistake pisses them off; but telling someone that the consequences of the action they deliberately undertook suck is just unforgivable.
I imagine that their real fear is not so much that 'smartwatches' and cellphones, and similar will directly replace them; consumer electronics crap with 3 year or less upgrade cycles isn't a good candidate for that; but that people who are either used to not wearing watches at all or used to wearing watches that do something other than be ostentatiously mechanical will just stare blankly at their products; even once they've become old and rich.
I can certainly respect the amount of obstinately mechanical swiss-gnome fu that goes into high end watch movements; but I suspect that it takes years of acculturation to reach the point where you see such a device as aspirational, rather than as a curious expression of genetic drift in a particularly weird and isolated corner of the RTC market. When you offer a pointless luxury good; you are well advised to get nervous if people show signs of preferring to conspicuously consume by other means.
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If the people putzing around with 60GHz systems ever make it out of the embryonic phase('WirelessHD' has actually shipped a handful of devices; but is a likely proprietary dead-end; the 'Wireless Gigabit Alliance' as an insufferably stupid name and little or nothing you can actually buy; but has the support of the Wifi people and thus some hope of being a useful short-range-but-very-fast interoperable addition to 2.4 and 5 GHz networking), this kid is really going to have a bad time...
It's actually an immune response to 802.11 frames, not microwaves per se. The best way to confirm the diagnosis is to obtain some of the old pre-802.11b era gear, from when the spec still defined an IR physical layer. Then you can completely remove RF from the test environment; but still expose the subject to 802.11 frames.
Alas, finding Spectrix Inc. networking gear is pretty damn tricky these days, so it's a difficult test to perform.
For ADA purposes, the limitations imposed by the effects of an illness, or the treatment requirements of one, count as 'disabilities'(eg. unless you can prove that it would cause 'undue hardship', you would need to allow a diabetic some breaks to test blood sugar and administer insulin, if needed).
You do have to have a disability, and you can't just self-diagnose(it would be interesting to see what the court thinks of the quack who did the diagnosing in this case); but the law covers basically any functional impairment, if it can be overcome with a 'reasonable accommodation' and without 'undue hardship'. A limb stump or guide dog makes things nice and obvious; but any medical issue potentially qualifies if it has functional impact.
I suspect that if the school is just running wifi to save on cabling costs and to allow students and staff to screw around on their phones; they might have an ADA problem. Not because kiddo is actually sensitive to 802.11-compliant microwave chatter; but because kiddo has some sort of actual psych issue that can be mitigated just by turning some APs off.
However, if the school has introduced assorted mobile devices into their curriculum(which wouldn't be a surprise, ipads are a huge craze in education, and Fay certainly has the cash for it); the case might really hit the rocks on 'undue hardship' because the accommodation would require forcing the school to use a less-optimal curriculum, without any devices that cannot be hardwired or situations where hardwired devices aren't practical, for all the students who share a class with this kid(and, unless their IT office is good at toggling POE ports, potentially all students who share a classroom with this kid). That's the sort of disruption of how things are done that goes beyond mere money or inconvenience. It also(unlike added aids, braille texts, audio amplification, screen readers, magnification devices, and so on) isn't something that you can just get the affected kid, it's something you have to take away from everyone else.
In this case, it isn't even a school board, it's a private school's admin, so it is likely to be even less their problem. A public school district is legally obligated to deal with basically whatever the residents of the area spawn; either in-house or by paying for an appropriate specialist placement(I think that kiddo going to jail makes him not their problem anymore; but if so that's about it).
A private school has no particular obligation to deal with anyone in particular; so long as they don't explicitly step on some protected class or (as is being argued in this case) fail to make reasonable accommodation per the ADA.
If it were a public school, it would be the school's problem, just as they have to make provision for the education of any other sickie(mental or physical); but for the private school to be obligated; it has to be demonstrated that kiddo has a 'disability' for ADA purposes, that they are capable of performing if provided with 'reasonable accommodation', and that the 'reasonable accommodation' would not cause 'undue hardship' for the entity being asked to provide it.
I'd be interested to know how the meaning of those terms would be decided in this case. Fay is a pretty fancy school, east coast private boarding school with history dating back before 1900 and its own endowment and all; but even if that mitigates any argument about the financial impact of having to hardwire everything, it might well be argued that, say, making it impossible for anyone in this kid's class to do an ipad-related curriculum activity would impose excessive limitations on their ability to learn, and the school to teach, as it usually does. If the school were purely doing wireless because it was cheaper, they might have issues; but today wireless devices are used routinely in situations where hardwired stuff would never have been considered practical; plus(unlike an accommodation that requires adding something, like a braille copy of the textbook or the like, the accomodation here demanded requires depriving everyone in the student's proximity of any use of wifi devices, or segregating the student, neither of which are likely to go over all that well.)
Is that you, senator Joe? And, um, what relevance does that have to the winnability of a nuclear exchange?
It sounds like a quip; but it's the truth: more redundancy. Nothing is going to allow a system(whether it is all handled by the filesystem or the work is divided between a RAID controller and a filesystem) to recover a chunk of data that the universe violently removes except another copy of that data or something from which it can be deterministically inferred(even if you accept the 'random number generator and a lot of patience' mode of data recovery, you still need to know when you've recovered the correct data).
If you have a full proof of the behavior of the system, you can at least know what sorts of failures, and where, will cause loss, and of what; but any real-world implementation is going to ultimately rest on a judgement about acceptable risk vs. acceptable cost of redundant hardware. Had the system in your post been running 5 disks in RAID1, it would have been totally fine with the loss of up to 4 disks; but not terribly efficient. Elegant math can make detecting errors more likely, allow for redundancy that is more efficient than naive copying, provide insight into what steps in the process are points of failure, how severe they are, and so on; but unless you have an ideal computer to run it on, it will be a matter of some degree of chance, though ideally a well understood degree knowingly chosen.
This seems particularly absurd given that the point in question was 'not believing that World War Three is winnable'.
It takes pretty impressive doublethink to suggest that pessimism about a hypothetical nuclear exchange that the government's own strategists were talking about in terms of 'mutually assured destruction' and 'deterrence' is somehow a product of propaganda.
I apologize if I was unclear: my intent with that was to note that 'unprecedented-and-cool' is one virtue that a space project can have, with scientific utility being another, economic value another, defense/intelligence applications, another, and so on. 'Unprecedented-and-cool' isn't terribly high on the hierarchy of virtues, certainly not worth sacrificing real science for; but at least it is something. My point was that, in addition to substantial deficiencies in scientific value, economic utility, etc. it doesn't even have the compensatory value of being really cool. It doesn't tick any of the boxes nearly as well as one would want for how much it costs, not even coolness, much less actually useful virtues.
If it has video-in and supports being used as a touchscreen monitor, it might actually be quite competitive; just not as a tablet.
For whatever reasons of history and economies of scale, touchscreen monitors are painfully expensive(awful crap starts at ~$200 and people are still selling 15 inch units with resistive sensors for $300 and up with a straight face, presumably because everything about the 'point of sale' market sucks). Assuming that this device is well-built enough to survive as a tablet, it'll be more rugged than most touchscreen monitors on the low end; and quite possibly have better panel quality, since tablets usually need displays good enough that rotating them won't cause viewing angle issues.
I, thankfully, am not among the lost and the damned who actually need touchscreen monitors, much less rugged ones; but if I were I'd be looking at this with some interest(if video-in is available). Unless Samsung gets too optimistic about the price, this might well stack up quite favorably even if you ignore the internal computer capabilities entirely.
Truly, the ISS is the gem of human scientific endeavor in space. Was that actually the most interesting microgravity experiment that anyone could think of to fill that chunk of payload space; or are they trying to land some corporate sponsors?
There was a time I understood this during the PPC era of mac, but now that macs run on commodity, non specialized CISC based x86, I have no idea why they retain their value. A lot of PC makers are starting to make machines that look *almost* as nice as a MBP. My HP Envy Beats laptops have a nice aluminum case.
What I don't understand about the 'macs retain their value!' thing is not the hardware side(macs indeed tend to have excellent build quality and, unless one of the specific cursed models, reliability); but the fact that the OSX upgrade pace is so ruthless; and Apple has so many of the 3rd party developers onboard.
An older PC may be a piece of shit held together with spit and duct tape; but whiny corporate customers and driver releases from assorted device and chip vendors mean that even surprisingly ancient PC hardware can be upgraded long, long, after it was made(though it'll probably need more RAM if you want to enjoy the process). Plus, while running an OS that doesn't get security patches anymore is insane, 3rd party vendors tend to support OSes 1 or 2, sometimes more, versions behind the latest release, so the only programs that effectively exclude old hardware are the ones that simply demand too much power.
OSX goes through versions swiftly, leaves models in its wake without mercy; and 3rd party vendors are usually pretty quick to also move to the new-and-shiny OS version, with support for users of older OSes confined to making old versions of their products available, if that.
That is what puzzles me: The mac is likely to be in excellent physical condition after all those years; but it will be much closer to being stricken from the OSX upgrades list; and once that happens 3rd party support also dwindles pretty quickly. That would seem to cut a lot of the value off, unless you have a particular legacy app you need to support; or are planning on bootcamping/running Linux anyway.
I, thankfully, am in the 'Windows 10? Why there are years left on our Win7 support!' boat at work; but the one major inducement, if you happen to be stuck with any, is some of the hardware that shipped with Win8 or 8.1: Some perfectly normal, also-supports-win7-at-least-if-purchased-as-a-business-customer, hardware was crippled with Win8; but there were also a lot of tablet and tablet-ish things that came out of Intel's "Let's sell Bay Trail Atoms for negative amounts of money because ARM is starting to scare us" campaign.
Win10 is very arguably a substantial improvement over Win8; and that class of devices is never going to get Win7 support. Those were the systems where storage was often eMMC rather than PATA/SATA, a nontrivial number of peripherals were not on the PCI root at all, and various other oddities that freak Win7 out. If you have those; Win10 is starting to look a lot more attractive than Win8/8.1
If you have more normal PC-compatible gear, the prospect is less exciting.
Given Apple's giant pile of money, I can't argue that they are making a mistake; but it's never been news that desktops are the segment that they can barely bring themselves to care about; much less actively attempt to engage potential new customers(even more now that iDevices are a viable 'gateway' purchase; and desktop market share is being eaten by laptops even among PCs).
If Apple gave a damn, the mythical mac min-tower would exist; and it'd be possible to buy something that costs somewhere between a mini and an imac; but has at least one PCIe x16 slot and maybe even some space for hard drives. It doesn't; and really never has, unless you count the runt-of-the-litter single socket workstations, which were that expandable; but pricier.
If you are in this market, Apple has nothing to offer you, and it appears that they like it that way.
For the purposes of pro-Linux bigotry the big letdown of Apple hardware(the x86 stuff, the big letdown of the ARM based stuff is obvious); is the firmware. The situation is slightly improved by the fact that there aren't too many variants to target, and macs are popular with software developers; but Apple's interpretation of EFI is weirder, if perhaps more competent, than even the horrible people on the PC side.
Was an SSD involved? Unless you are really scraping the bottom of the barrel, or running something brutal, it's tricky to under-buy on CPUs; and even the RAM situation isn't as bad as it used to be(you still probably want to double what the base model has; but back in the bad old days you effectively needed to double and probably wanted to quadruple what the base model has); but the difference between systems running from HDDs and systems running from SSDs is a pretty dramatic jump.
The corporate market is actually relatively intolerant of failure; and to the degree that it is tolerant, demands that swift repair or replacement be at least available as an option. This has the downside of often creating oddballs that are a real pain if you don't have warranty service, since they are composed entirely of proprietary FRUs with no availability beyond assorted secondary market refurb slingers; but when they are under warranty the expectation is that isolating the faulty part will be fast, a replacement should be on the Fedex truck as fast as possible, and physically swapping it out will be minimally fussy and ideally toolless. Not all models achieve this ideal, and there have been some notorious ones over the years; but neither the customer nor the vendor is at all happy in those situations. The customer deals with a lot of downtime; the vendor has a large number of customers with fancy warranties, so if their parts are crap actually honoring those warranties can get very expensive, very fast(even if the replacement parts were free, the shipping alone will erase your profit on the sale of the unit pretty quickly).
Apple is actually an interesting sort of middle ground. They refuse to sell the real low-cost crap, and so are largely spared the "well of course it broke within 18 months; because we had to squeeze the BOM until it bled in order to get you to buy it, rather than the other guy's one that cost $5 less" problems. They also offer the best in-person support around(if you are suitably close to one of their retail locations). Other consumer brands are usually restricted to mail-in service from the vendor, or the painfully uneven and often horrific world of 3rd party support(some of which is excellent; but much of which is the geek squad). However, their gear is not exactly built with serviceability in mind; and they aren't terribly aggressive about very fast turnaround, on site tech visits, or other (costly; but available with the fancy warranty) corporate-market services.
It's easy to see why they are so popular in the consumer market; they've done a great job of forcing users to buy the computer that they actually want, rather than picking the price tag that they think they want; and offer better support than most vendors' consumer-grade lines; but they definitely won't coddle you the way an enterprise vendor with whom you have a suitably nice warranty agreement will.
Where did you get the impression that the charge was 'insufficent coolness'? The charge is 'poor science/cost ratio; maintained at the expense of other possible projects.'
Manned space activity is actually very, very, good at generating coolness. Possibly too good, when it comes to adjusting the allocation of resources to various projects.
The ISS has zero lift capacity; but it demands considerable lift capacity to keep it supplied with rotating crew, their consumables, and assorted bits and pieces. Plus the launch of the original modules. That's the 'per unit lift capacity' I'm referring to. We have transported a considerable amount of mass into orbit to have the ISS. Does it compare favorably to other missions that could have been performed with those resources?
Please do correct me if I'm factually misinformed; but my impression is that 'saving the ISS' isn't exactly a noble cause when it comes to actually doing [i]science[/i] in and about space.
I'm personally very much in favor of NASA's role in aeronautics and space R&D(both the necessary delivery systems and the cool exploratory robots we have probing various bits of the solar system and the assorted satellites focused on earth-surface observation and astronomy work that the atmosphere would interfere with); but the ISS seems like the very worst flavor of man-in-a-can makework nonsense. It doesn't even have the cool-and-unprecedented factor of the sending-men-to-the-moon projects; but it consumes a lot of orbital lift capacity to send a rotating crew of humans; and the supplies to support them to a motly collection of hamster tubes in an orbit so low it barely counts as out of the atmosphere.
Is there any serious defense of the ISS in terms of a results per unit spend or unit lift capacity? It's neat, and it has podcasts, and such; but it had better be a lot of neat to justify all the possible 'send robotic probe to do something' or 'assemble larger telescope in orbit' or other projects that could have been done instead.
As much as 'Linux' keeps being dragged into assorted rambling-think-pieces as though it were a direct analog to the OS-and-also-a-big-suite-of-hardware-software-and-'cloud'-service-offerings referred to as 'Windows' and 'Apple' or 'OSX'; 'Linux', so far as it is Linus' problem, is a kernel. It's also a kernel that has succeeded largely on the basis of being widely supported, reasonably flexible(with greater flexibility available to those willing to do additional heavy lifting themselves), and an inexpensive implementation of mostly-unix-like behavior.
That's not a role 100% free of strategic considerations(like the current 'beating on the ARM vendors to un-fuck the current fragmented hellhole of disjointed BSPs and embrace sanity' initiative); but it is one where "ensure continued cooperation among interested users and hardware vendors, integrate promising out-of-tree developments as demand and maturity suggest" is more or less the best strategy to take. It's not as though it would even be meaningful for an OS to "Embrace a cloud services strategy", since that happens at a different level of the stack entirely; and to the degree that OS development does need, and do, blue-sky cool-new-architecture-from-the-ground-up; that isn't exactly mainline Linux's problem; and Linux probably isn't even an obvious starting point(if your bold new OS concept makes use of some sort of exotic hardware capabilities, you'll presumably be prototyping on FPGAs or the ASICs you are developing in tandem with the OS; if it is designed to work with mostly standard hardware; but do some part of being an OS differently, you can develop against a delightfully small and stable collection of 'hardware' thanks to VMs.
I might actually vote for him because of this policy. Never thought I would say that.
I'd be inclined to see whether his various business ventures have exhibited this sort of hiring policy; or whether he's a "Buy American!" sort of guy when looking for votes; and a buy Mexican sort of guy when looking for labor...
His willingness to play the overt nativist is useful in that it may help force the Republicans to quit equivocating on whether they feel like serving their plutocratic wing's enthusiasm for cheap labor or their working class wing's desire to not be reduced to squalor and/or surrounded by filthy foreign hordes; but I wouldn't necessarily mistake it for honesty.
It isn't "naïveté", it's an active policy. We are familiar with foreign corrupt practices; and duly enacted the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act(unfortunately, there is no Domestic Corrupt Practices Act, so a major loophole remains unfilled). The act allows for certain exceptions; but is largely intended to prevent US companies and persons contributing to further corruption in assorted already-corrupt locations.
That just makes it worse: telling someone that they made a mistake pisses them off; but telling someone that the consequences of the action they deliberately undertook suck is just unforgivable.
I imagine that their real fear is not so much that 'smartwatches' and cellphones, and similar will directly replace them; consumer electronics crap with 3 year or less upgrade cycles isn't a good candidate for that; but that people who are either used to not wearing watches at all or used to wearing watches that do something other than be ostentatiously mechanical will just stare blankly at their products; even once they've become old and rich.
I can certainly respect the amount of obstinately mechanical swiss-gnome fu that goes into high end watch movements; but I suspect that it takes years of acculturation to reach the point where you see such a device as aspirational, rather than as a curious expression of genetic drift in a particularly weird and isolated corner of the RTC market. When you offer a pointless luxury good; you are well advised to get nervous if people show signs of preferring to conspicuously consume by other means.
This story is amusing because a company named 'Fossil' produces obsolete products.