Agreed... and frankly... I thought the comparison was utter crap... Really... a first generation Atom against a modern ARM? First generation Atom was utter crap and solved no other issue that providing a cheap atom based platform to play with. What about the N2600 or even better... the Medfield (had to google for ages for that name haha)? Atom 330 was just not worth it.
Besides... one of Apple's greatest strengths regarding the iPad is that they release one per year at most. They make each one solid as hell and Nokia has already proven they can't do a damn thing right... they keep trying to either make it about Windows or about Nokia. When it comes to tablets, it's about the overall platform... frankly, Microsoft has a strong offering. Having used Windows 8 on a Samsung Series 7 Slate for about 7 months now, I find this interesting.
Here are the problems though.
- Limited utility. It's just another iPad competitor with Windows RT. Other than Office, it doesn't provide anything really amazing that Apple doesn't. - No development tools. Microsoft almost certainly won't be porting Visual Studio to the Windows RT platform but instead will choose to make it.NET based only which means you have to compile on x86 and remote debug. - Limited chances of it being polished at release. Let's face it... if Microsoft doesn't get this right on the first try, the media will tear them limb from limb and it'll fail before it even makes it to the shops. - Legacy support. By choosing ARM as their platform, they have effectively said they don't want legacy on it. - Microsoft store. If the Microsoft store for Windows is as bad as the Microsoft store for Windows Phone, it's already failed. The #1 reason I still haven't published several apps I have waiting to release for Windows Phone is that I refuse for my software to be stuck between two programs which advertise "20 high quality latex pics for $0.99"... same reason I don't do Android. I want a more serious store front where the company running the store is more serious about it. Microsoft really screwed up the Windows Phone platform because of that. - Facebook integration... really... this is REALLY bad on Windows platforms. I use FaceBook, but I don't want it taking over my system. I have a really beautiful LG Windows Phone which I don't use since I can't use the damn phone book. I don't want my friends list in my contacts list. If you must do this, make it a totally separate page. I don't want to mix friends with business. Yes, I know this is Windows Phone not Windows 8.... well... still no contacts app for Windows 8, I'm expecting the boil over here. What Microsoft does right one platform, they do right on most... same goes for what they do wrong. - WAYYYY TOOO EARLY!!!! I have been hoping for years for Microsoft to do this. I always liked Microsoft hardware (even sorta liked my Zune) but if they announce it now and release it with Windows 8 in August-October to the general public... it's just too damn soon. I would hesitate to buy one since it would feel like Microsoft didn't take it seriously enough to start with and said "Let's make a tablet too and see if it floats... we can always fall back on partners if it doesn't!" where I prefer the Apple approach of "We're betting A LOT on this! We promise to support this 100% for the next two years at least and this is THE platform". The way it seems.. it's just another hacked together device. No I haven't seen it, but they haven't bothered announcing it before now... it feels like after a week of every company on the planet bragging about their Windows 8 tablets... this is just and afterthought.
I can go on for a while... but as I said... I've been hoping they'll do this for years... too bad they'll probably screw it up to avoid hurting the feelings of their hardware partners like HP, ASUS, Dell etc...
I went to a high school where we had a great administration in New York and things were kept under control. We had all the freedom to do whatever we wanted but the administration made sure that we had more to gain through learning and behaving that otherwise. No police state... no zero tolerance bullshit. Just a great school with great teachers...
then I moved to Florida... and I saw how the other 90% lives.
Let's first be honest... the Florida educational system is among the worst in the entire world. I first started high school in Westbury, NY where it was common for the average student to have completed... with college credit calculus 1 as well as AP English. The principle demanded high academic achievement from his students. He cared less about standardized tests and focused entirely on educating the students. We had places on school grounds to smoke, we were allowed to leave campus during lunch etc... We earned his trust and generally deserved it. As a result, he got state and federal budgets to build computer and engineering labs that were beyond most universities in quality.
When I moved to Florida, things were much different. When my father pulled up to the admissions office with me, there were two police patrol cars parked out front of the principles office. When we went in, I asked "Why are there police cars here?" The principle told me, the school had two full time police officers on campus. I asked her "Do you have such big problems at your school that this is justified?" and she informed me in so many words that apparently the administration was incapable of controlling their own school and therefore needed all the help the could get. Students kept trying to leave school grounds during the day and they were generally unruly and there were major issues with racial "wars" on the campus. Then she continued to inform me about how there was a pizza hut in the cafeteria and that they were one of the top rated schools in Pinellas county. And yet, the most advanced math they offered was trigonometry and that students are allowed (in fact punished if the don't) use calculators on exams. The teacher of the course was named "Coach Nick" and he spent about 50% of each class hitting on the cheerleaders in the front of the class and yapping about how "He would have gone pro... but".
Frankly, there are good public schools and piss poor ones. Apparently in Florida, the schools have terrible budgets and generally favor business administrators as opposed to educators for leadership positions. The voting majority... you know... those wrinkled up prune-like things with blue hair prefer the tax money to be spent on things like prisons as opposed to schools since having a place to send those uneducated, unruly brats when they leave school is more effective than educating them so they can be productive members of society. See the problem is, prisons solve the problem now, schools take 7-10 years to improve the situation and they'll be dead by then. If you ask them "What about their grand children?"... well that's easy... "They live in Michigan".
The poster above said "maybe he should be sent to school so that he can get taught by qualified educators", my experience in Florida suggests this means a private school. In the entire Dunedin High School which had a huge number of students and teachers, there were only a handful of "Qualified" educators.
I in fact was suspended for two weeks for walking off campus to go somewhere I could get a healthy lunch as opposed to the stuff which has made America fat. I said "Fuck that" and was suspended for two more weeks. I then dropped out, got my GED and went to the Junior College instead.
I gave up system level programming as a career since I was tired of my hobby and career being the same thing... it meant that for the last 30 years of my life (I'm not that old.... just started young), I have spent a minimum of 8 hours a day 7 days a week... often on vacations too in front of a screen and with no social life. I moved into teaching Cisco networking which I'm finding to be really fun and fulfilling.... I have had insanely good results... I am teaching my fourth course this week and so far I'm already setting new records for evaluations at the end of each week since I have a real passion for it. And oddly, I am making more money (2-3 times as much) as I was making when I actually made Cisco products Doh!
That said... I spend a huge amount of time trying to figure out how to teach topics that are "advanced computing" related to people who need it fed to them in small words and made as simple as possible. I create analogies for things like understanding binary by making an imaginary currency called Binaries (sounds like dinaries) which come in coins starting at one and doubling for each denomination and ask them to make change and put the coins in the proper drawers (which happen to start empty) of a cash register without using the same coin twice. When you remove the math aspect from it and make it a simple task which they have done each time they visit a new country with a new currency they stop being afraid of it and move on.
Programming is often easiest to teach to non-programmers by asking people to "write a program" telling someone how to get from the airport to their house. Things like "If Shell gas station on opposite corner from me and hours of opening are from 6am to 11pm, then turn left". To describe functions, I would ask them to place each actual part of the directions on separate page of a document... mix them up and then on a single page, create a master document which refers to each page as a function to produce the program flow. Do the same with making dough for bread... "Kneed bread violently for 10 minutes"... "If the dough has dried out... add a sprinkle of water." "If the dough is too moist or is sticking to the cooking surface, add a little flour", "Repeat previous two tasks". "Loop back to the kneeding process if the dough has too many bubbles". etc...
I think two hours of this kind of instruction at lunch is enough to teach structured programming. Object oriented programming would require a much longer post:)
The top rated private schools are often top rated because they drill for standardized exams.:(
I know a huge number of people who went to private schools not because mom and dad were motivated but because it was fashionable. It can easily go both ways.
That said... if you find a private school who boots kids out who don't meet certain academic requirements... even if the kids parents are rich an powerful, this is a great option. That way, if your students are hurting the rest of the class, you can call the parents and they'll quickly sort out the problems.
I actually really like middle class private schools as opposed to upper class ones since middle class ones generally have students whose parents sent them there because of academic reasoning as opposed to fashion.
haha sorry... too little too late from me. I haven't check mail in... forever:)
Thank you for posing that question, I regularly attack people for simply bashing governments and not offering a alternative. After all, it's easy being a critic, you just have to point out the problems and not offer solutions.
I didn't know the details of the attack, but like most "news worthy items" the details were unimportant to the reporter of the article I read. So I was short in information. I have worked with/for (subcontractor of a subcontractor twice removed or something) and found that it's often a miracle Lockheed could accomplish anything. In order to score new projects, the people who would have been worth anything to begin with were taking off of projects regularly in order to be placed on new projects since the second Lockheed scored one project, they'd start posturing for the next claiming "You'll have the brainiacs that did this on your project"... so they'd get at most 3 months on each project. What's left afterwards are burnt out guys or guys that weren't really that good to brag about in a sales room.
I have to admit, I don't know an alternative. Usually I'm quick to think of something, but given the scale of a project like this, I'd say there's no company suited for this and it would be far more intelligent to focus on having in-house resources for this. People may complain about "big government", but in reality, in situations like this one, often the best solution is simply to do it yourself.:(
I am a system level developer who has implemented encryption technologies used in top-secret environments. Also I have worked on mobile device development at a system level for many years. I can't detail my credentials, but for as much as anyone else on Slashdot can be considered reliable,... well you take it from there.
1) So far as I know, the only "smart phone" OS which has been "properly audited" was the specific versions of BlackBerry OS which is used by Obama. This does not include all versions of Blackberry OS... only the versions which have been specifically audited and approved for use on his phone. This does not mean that the OS is secure, the NSA audit on the code was performed too quickly for my tastes. It just means that the majority of "obvious holes" are not present. This completely rules out the newer QNX based OS for Blackberry since there is absolutely no possible way that much code could be properly audited in the time which it has been available. On top of that code audits are only a small part of what you need to do to secure a few million lines of code which is heavily communication oriented. Of course, running a simply security auditor on the OS helps as well, but I wouldn't bank on that either. An OS needs years of testing at a single revision before it can be truly solid.
2) Android may or may not be secure. It's extremely unlikely. If however you want Android and can't live without it, make sure to use only OS images which are hash check verified (MD5, SHA...) from Google directly. If the phone can't run the stock OS, DON'T USE IT! The reason for this is that the OEMs often update and modify code before putting it on the phones. They are feature oriented, not security oriented. Google Nexus would be a decent choice for this.
3) Don't even consider Windows, Symbian or iOS based phones. iOS is the safest of those three, but lacks pretty much all the features you're interested in. So far as I know, Apple doesn't even care about a "trusted platform" as the cost of maintaining a trusted platform is WAY TOO HIGH and would never yield the profits Apple demands from products. Windows and Symbian just aren't about trusted in the first place and the serious short comings in the Symbian "Development process" make it far too susceptible to being able to be hacked. Without decent development tools and kernel level debugging (which Symbian simply lacks for the most part) it's not possible to harden an OS. Also since Symbian never made use of things like "Test driven development", any change in one place could wreck 100 things elsewhere... and often did.
4) Never EVER allow users to install apps... ESPECIALLY ON A JAVA PHONE meaning Blackberry or Android. This is because Java is insanely easy to hack. Yes, I know Oracle and Sun say otherwise... but I recall Yugo also calling their cars safe. Voluntarily installing an app which replaces the class loader on the system is enough to hack the entire thing. There are hundreds of other ways to hack Java which is obvious to me an others that can be exploited with a simple malicious chunk of code in an app. Also, since Java based platforms don't generally allow sandboxing, the apps all kind of have access to override system resources and interfere with each other.
While I personally despise Blackberry having tried it a few times and felt like I was using junk, if you must have these features, you should use their hardened and audited system.
He might end up with Blackberry based on QNX which is not the secure BlackBerry which the NSA and those guys cleared for Bama.
Blackberry on QNX is a thoroughly untested system based on a nearly full rewrite of the operating system which we all know suffered from severe rush to market syndrome. Meaning that there is no possible way a product which is almost certainly a million lines of code or more has been thoroughly tested for security. I mention in previous comments that QNX runs an in-house TCP/IP stack which almost certainly is exploitable. It runs in a separate process from the kernel, but it's still not the IP stacks used by millions and tested by every security lab on earth. The way you know for sure that it's got holes in it is that no one has reported holes on it. What this means is, no one has put it to the test yet. Or we could be expected to simply believe that QNX wrote every line of code perfect and they never had a bug... ever.
I've worked with QNX (with them directly on project with many many developers on their side as well as mine) and learned that QNX, just like other companies is not perfect. The only reason why they're secure is that we don't know what the holes are yet.
Let's not forget the Java platform which really does make it wonderfully hackable. Java provides so many possible ways to install rootkits and trojans that unless they found a way to run each app in a separate process, it's hopeless.
So... if people want to steer the reader well... they should recommend the old Blackberry stuff... it'll be years before we can consider this to be secure.
Pre-QNX BB was pretty secure... but with the whole rewrite, there is absolutely no possible way a device with that much code changed and that little use so far can be secure. I justify it above.
The new BB based on QNX is not tested for security yet. Yes... they did internal testing and all that and QNX has a history for being secure for the most part, but with several million new lines of code to compose the full rewrite of black berry's software, there's no possible way they could have tested that phone for any reasonable level of security in that time.
Also please keep in mind that QNX develops their own TCP/IP stack which I personally have used for about 20 years. And after having access to the OS source (and having worked closely with QNX on software projects for years) I don't feel confident that their stack is as secure as they say it is. Remember that QNX is one of the hardest operating systems on the planet to perform system level debugging on. This makes it very hard to properly audit the stack. It is however a user-mode stack which means there's less chances of kernel level "root kits".
Also, the phone is based on Java which is not very hard to hack... a simple "friendly" app can easily replace the JAVA class loader and pretty much run key loggers and such without a problem.
The only thing which appears to make BB secure is their advertising. They tell us all how secure they are and we feel secure with them. Without a proper code audit, I wouldn't ever consider them secure.
1) Who compiled it (a release manager at the OEM who is the lowest paid guy on the team)? 2) Who reviewed it (no one)? 3) Who audited it (no one)? 4) Is the OS signed and locked to the phone (nope)? 5) Can an OEM slipstream device drivers or system level code onto the device (yes)? 6) Can app developers slipstream drivers or system level code onto the device (usually)?
Unless you can be 100% sure that the guy who compiled release of the OS was actually aware of what they were doing with regards to security (less than 10% chance), it is entirely possible the phone should not be considered secured.
Both you and the poster above are kinda screwey in terms of thinking.
First of all... while implementing security code in VHDL or Verilog is possible and has been done, the CPU is just not a big risk in this case. You can use a CPU from a company you're sure is fishy and so long as the software above it is written properly, it should make no difference. It's not really even a matter of cost. Encryption is a software feature... security in general is software oriented. In a system such as Android where the processor itself doesn't even run the executable code but instead runs code JITed for the processor, it's even less relevant. I can write 10 pages on this to prove my point, but it's a waste of time.
On the other hand, there's nothing that says that a second microcontroller couldn't be hidden in the phone which runs a second network session in the background. Still, there is too much dependence on software and things like keys and such that would make it impossible for this to be an issue if the software is written properly.
It would just be stupid to waste time developing a malicious CPU if you can just install what you want on the phone itself as software.
CABAC doesn't scale well in massively threaded environments that is true. However there are ways to avoid the issues involved and this really isn't the issue either. It's not the CABAC so much as the bit stream writing for the most part. CABAC scales fine if you parallelize it across slices. Of course no modern encoders make use of multiple slices per field/frame, so it's more of an issue of whether latency is an issue. You can run parallel CABAC encoders by buffering frames.
The real problem especially when dealing with a NVidia vs. ATI issue is that while floating point performance on these two GPUs rock, the NVidia chips have piss poor support for shift/rotate etc... bit level operations on internal registers which makes reading and writing bit streams utterly painful at best. The CABAC code obviously takes a pretty severe hit from this. A solution to this problem is a single shared table across parallel threads for all 8 bit position states. Though, this will likely still suck since there will be huge numbers of mutexes on the table for the lookup and the table is just too large to duplicate for each core. But on the NVidia, binary manipulation operations seriously are lacking where ATI has had those sorted out for a while. This is also why doing hash brute force cracking on an NVidia appears much slower than on a ATI.
I personally use NVidia for games and ATI for computing.
People have mentioned electricity and such. They have mentioned the utility of the smaller drives etc...
Let's be frank... any home built PC with the ability to flood a gigabit Ethernet line or two will actually be quite power hungry. These Atom based NAS boxes aren't actually using straight ITX Atom boards, they have precisely what is needed, nothing more, nothing less. They are extremely power efficient as well.
FreeNAS, OpenFiler and several others out there are awesome tools. I have a FreeNAS server myself... though my home file server is running Windows 7 with 8x2TB with a SAS RAID controller, my iSCSI box for VMWare is running FreeNAS. I love it... but to be honest, it is not power efficient. If I spent 6 months to a year focussed on tuning FreeNAS to this specific system, I might be able to get power usage and the function set up to what I could have gotten from QNAP for example for a few hundred bucks.
For my super important file storage, I will very likely this week, after years of FreeNAS simply buy a two drive box with 3TB drives in RAID1 and put it on a different floor of the house. My network in the house is now made up of multiple Cisco Catalyst gigabit switches with four cable etherchannel between each floor. So, a little NAS with a RAID1 that supports etherchannel would be great for backing up parts of my server:)
No... my house doesn't look like a mess... I have very clean cabling and nice looking racks that blend with the furniture:)
Next you'll start bragging about how Metro on a tablet kicks the crap out of pretty much all the other tablet OSes (been running it as such since December and... well it does, have the other too... use them as coffee cup coasters now), and how the biggest VoiP provider in Europe delivers touch screen telephones running on Wintel and how Microsoft products currently have the best documentation (start with MSDN for developers and move through all the other products and when that's not good enough look to Microsoft press) out there. Or how like after 28 years, X11 still doesn't have a reliable way to configure network adapters without modifying the/etc directory or how after playing catch-up for years, DirectX passed and left behind OpenGL in features and consistency.... hell, you need to read two books on OpenGL these days just to learn the "best practice" method of uploading a vertex list.
Pretty sure that while we're all talking about how irrelevant they are in modern culture, they're just sitting back and letting us all buy their products and saying "Well... we'd rather be considered irrelevant than evil... Google and be evil... we'll just take the money and be happy and chug along making new stuff". I think that Microsoft's fading to behind the scenes might have been the most profitable thing they ever did. Let's face it, the justice department is pretty much leaving them alone, anti-trust suits have faded away, they're just making money like they always have and "Don't be evil Google" and "Think Different Apple" are now the new companies to be paying out fortunes in settlements while Microsoft just keeps one making products and selling them.
Holy shit, I just read your remark after the one I wrote. Then I realized that we probably both subconsciously wrote using vocabulary that would hopefully clearly differentiate ourselves from the "Walmart People" in the eyes of "our peers" haha. I'm tempted to go back and write it in Walmart English now that I realized it.
People still think that "Survival of the fittest" or "Only the strong will survive" is the entire premise of natural selection. These are obviously over simplifications which completely fail to describe natural selection but has been adopted by many that in theory should have been selected out long ago to boost their egos. I am not referring to anyone that has posted thus far as opposed to making a simple observation, so please don't see this as bait.
If I were to provide my 2 cents on this topic (which it appears I will), I would postulate that to a certain extent, we are going through a transitional period. While the specimens of humanity that are clearly most suited for environmental adaptation have focused on meeting the market demand to prolong life and attempt to eliminate natural death, people classically selected out through illness, disease and general stupidity on their own behalf are being protected from these dangers and surviving. It is believed that the human race will reproduce more rapidly in areas of higher mortality rates. This is to guarantee the survival of the race. People who were classically at the highest risk of death from disease would also reproduce at the greatest rate in order to perpetuate the race. So, families who have a long history of dieing off from any number of any number of environmentally induced issues will produce a gaggle of children with the hopes that one or two will survive. But since we have eliminated most of the environmental threats to these people, they are living through all these former perils. However since their instinct of survival of the race convinces them to reproduce more rapidly without proper consideration to the lower mortality rate, a great deal more of what formally was considered fodder, are surviving, hence the previous poster's comments to Walmart people.
Women who are pregnant read magazines that educate them as to how to protect their wombs. The articles they read state things like "Doing this increases the chance of first trimester spontaneous abortion by 300%". I can't possibly imagine how a comment like that can be made, there are an infinite number of variables that are involved in gestation, to suggest any single event can increase the risks of spontaneous abortion in the first trimester is just plain rubbish. What is worse, are we talking about 1 in a million to 3 in a million? Are we talking 1 in 10 to 3 in 10? It doesn't say, just says by 300%. Yet, women will instantly stop doing whatever it says they shouldn't do to avoid that.
Nature is no longer selecting out "Walmart people" since we have averted most of the dangers they have faced in the past. In fact, we have even reached a point where people such as my sister (a typical Walmart patron) now survive and bring additional offspring into the world where she attempts to protected them from everything to an extremity. For example, her children were not allowed to play with wooden toys like Lincoln Logs since they might get a splinter from them. She is entirely incapable of rational and intelligent thought, but thanks to medicine and excessive warning labels, her line will perpetuate. Don't get me wrong, I love my sister, but I am a realist in this regard.
We have protected these people to extreme levels and they are still reproducing at a rate that would protect their line against extinction. The "adapted" member of the species on the other hand reproduce at a more conservative rate since their instincts tell them that they'll experience a level closer to 95 out of 100 offspring surviving in their sub-species.
As a result, what is actually happening is that the "Walmart people" are actually in a major transition period of evolution. They are reproducing at a rate based on the fact that until less than 50 years ago, their chances of survival were much worse. It will require a few more generations before their over-reproduction becomes directly detrimental to their chances of survival and they will either be selected out or they will decrease their rate of repro
3. you can ask a knowledgeable staff member about the products
a) If you know enough about computers to be knowledgeable, you sure as hell will have a job making more money than Best Buy would pay. b) The guys selling the TVs don't know the first thing about them. For example... do they actually know what makes LCD better than plasma or the other way around? Do they even have the slightest clue how either technology works? Do they know anything at all about what the contrast ratio actually means? Do they even know enough about Ohm's law to understand cost savings on power? Do they have the slightest clue why top and bottom isn't as good as side by side for 3D? Absolutely not. All they know is what is written on the sheets next to the TVs and from what they watch while at work. c) Geek squad? Really? Personally, I want a nerd to fix problems... geeks are just outcasts posing as nerds in order to fit into some community where they could get some respect instead of just being geeks. This is one of the best names ever. When they named it, I don't think they had any idea how accurate it was to call them that. Can they fix some computer problems? Sure... anyone can change parts until it works and reinstall Windows. But frankly, their drivers license is more impressive than their computer skills. Rule #1... never ever trust a computer guy desperate enough to wear a stupid looking uniform to work. It's like asking the guy at the drive through window at McDonalds to fix your PC. And in that case, you might have more success.
When a company buys network equipment, if they need help from someone knowledgeable, they bring in someone from Cisco or Juniper who have actual certifications which require you to have at least a decent understanding of networking design and architecture to get. And by decent, I mean, they actually know what each component does and more or less how it works. Hell, you have to even understand TCP windowing to get the entry level certification.
When a consumer buys a TV which costs them more proportionately to their income than a few Ciscos costs a company, they trust a guy who's only qualification is a blue shirt tell them what they need or want.
So how would Best Buy actually fix this problem? Teach the guys selling TV how scaling engines work so they can better understand why the scaling engine of one model of TV is better than another? Make the guy at the front desk of the Geek Squad wear the shirt and in the back find "qualified" bench techs who actually are willing to fix PCs for a living and pay them appropriately? Hire former appliance repairmen to sell the white ware? It would be a start, but it would almost certainly bankrupt them faster.
Personally, I found that using a Samsung Series 7 Slate with Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Microsoft One Note is pretty damn impressive and it does a pretty good job of also transcribing to text from hand writing afterwards.
I know it's all Microsofty which is a anti-slashdot thing, but really, I've been using this for a few months and I've been really pleased.
In a period of 10 minutes of me using my Windows 8 tablet to show someone some code I've been writing today, 3 people actually hopped online to buy themselves a Windows 8 tablet as well. They loved it because they could replace their Windows PC and their iPad with a device that weighs the same as an iPad 3.
I actually feel like while Microsoft hasn't "Gotten it right!" on Windows 8, they've gotten it "A hell of a lot closer to right" than either Apple or Google did. Give it time and a few patches and I think they'll nail it.
Too bad... I don't know what to do with the iPads in my house anymore and I'm seriously considering Windows Phone now since Windows 8 is just so damn nice. And the fact that it runs iTunes and lets me keep everything but my games (which I never play) and TomTom, makes it perfect:)
Don't start counting any chickens... but yet... it won't take long before new PC sales pretty much flood the market with it.
I like that point better than most I've read here. It was well thought out. I have often been asked about who I'll vote for by people. I then explain that as an expatriate that did not establish a voting district before leaving, my vote is purely as part of the absenty counting which has no representation in the electoral college. Therefore, my vote is generally through attempting to educate others about my perspectives. To do this, I tend to try and help people choose the candidate they should want as opposed to the candidate I want. This way, I'm not stealing their vote but helping them to vote in the way that will best represent their needs and wants as opposed to simply voting for the guy with the nicest hair for example or that's part of the right party.
The ability to dismiss is an incredibly important feature of the American political system and it needs revision. Based on the original topic of the article and even your opening statement about lacking the expertise to make an informed decision based on who should in fact hold office based on the issues, I believe the system as it stands now makes it too easy to throw a person out of office before anything they have tried to accomplish actually is given a chance to work. People generally want instant gratification and instant improvements when a new president comes to office for example.
There is almost nothing a candidate can do prior to taking the presidency that will provide them enough information to actually make informed decisions regarding plans. They can make a plan to design a plan once they have the knowledge, but it's almost impossible to actually make a good plan without the actually experience from within the office. The exception would be if a vice president ran as the incumbent for the party and worked together with the president to prepare the plan before hand. Therefore, we have to assume that prior to coming into the presidential office, the plan is based mainly on intentions. Once the president comes to office, it's time to turn those intentions into a plan after learning about the presidential resources, liabilities and assets involved in making the plan happen. Unless you like hack and slash politics, the planning phase for the presidential programs should consume the first year of their term. Not only that, but teams of people should be assembled to identify what can go wrong with the plans and build contingencies for it.
The second year of office should be spent getting bills proposed, gaining support and passing them. With a good plan, it may be possible to pass laws without ear marks everywhere which, due to the insane financial crisis, Obama didn't have the luxury of on his initial bills. But he really should have had more time to get Obamacare right. By letting it be hacked and slashed by everyone who opposed it or wanted to tack something onto it, it was a bit of a mess. But if an entire year is devoted to just kissing asses, making back room shady deals and whatever else to pass the bills, then the third year will be about implementing them.
Now comes the real problem. The fourth year. It's utterly wasted. The president now has to spend all his time finding another country to fight to get the redneck vote (which is a HUGE vote). He has to raise money, make good on promises to big backers etc... he is in a position of power and he's forced to kiss rich peoples asses to raise money to get reelected. This is a terrible idea. What's worse is that he's being attacked by A LOT of people. He's losing support. Unless the other candidate is a total waste of skin who as no chance of winning, opposition in congress will do whatever is possible to stonewall the president to gain favor with the other candidate they are betting on. They'll even stonewall the president to make it harder for him to do anything in his last year before the election in order to make him look bad.
Instead of two 4 years terms, a president should have a single 8 term with something like a vote of no confidence in place which makes it near
Slashdot Mirror
I have an Icuti 920VR HUD which has VGA input and a 3D head positioning sensor...
In short... I love it for films... sometimes games... sucks for work
Agreed... and frankly... I thought the comparison was utter crap... Really... a first generation Atom against a modern ARM? First generation Atom was utter crap and solved no other issue that providing a cheap atom based platform to play with. What about the N2600 or even better... the Medfield (had to google for ages for that name haha)? Atom 330 was just not worth it.
Besides... one of Apple's greatest strengths regarding the iPad is that they release one per year at most. They make each one solid as hell and Nokia has already proven they can't do a damn thing right... they keep trying to either make it about Windows or about Nokia. When it comes to tablets, it's about the overall platform... frankly, Microsoft has a strong offering. Having used Windows 8 on a Samsung Series 7 Slate for about 7 months now, I find this interesting.
.NET based only which means you have to compile on x86 and remote debug.
Here are the problems though.
- Limited utility. It's just another iPad competitor with Windows RT. Other than Office, it doesn't provide anything really amazing that Apple doesn't.
- No development tools. Microsoft almost certainly won't be porting Visual Studio to the Windows RT platform but instead will choose to make it
- Limited chances of it being polished at release. Let's face it... if Microsoft doesn't get this right on the first try, the media will tear them limb from limb and it'll fail before it even makes it to the shops.
- Legacy support. By choosing ARM as their platform, they have effectively said they don't want legacy on it.
- Microsoft store. If the Microsoft store for Windows is as bad as the Microsoft store for Windows Phone, it's already failed. The #1 reason I still haven't published several apps I have waiting to release for Windows Phone is that I refuse for my software to be stuck between two programs which advertise "20 high quality latex pics for $0.99"... same reason I don't do Android. I want a more serious store front where the company running the store is more serious about it. Microsoft really screwed up the Windows Phone platform because of that.
- Facebook integration... really... this is REALLY bad on Windows platforms. I use FaceBook, but I don't want it taking over my system. I have a really beautiful LG Windows Phone which I don't use since I can't use the damn phone book. I don't want my friends list in my contacts list. If you must do this, make it a totally separate page. I don't want to mix friends with business. Yes, I know this is Windows Phone not Windows 8.... well... still no contacts app for Windows 8, I'm expecting the boil over here. What Microsoft does right one platform, they do right on most... same goes for what they do wrong.
- WAYYYY TOOO EARLY!!!! I have been hoping for years for Microsoft to do this. I always liked Microsoft hardware (even sorta liked my Zune) but if they announce it now and release it with Windows 8 in August-October to the general public... it's just too damn soon. I would hesitate to buy one since it would feel like Microsoft didn't take it seriously enough to start with and said "Let's make a tablet too and see if it floats... we can always fall back on partners if it doesn't!" where I prefer the Apple approach of "We're betting A LOT on this! We promise to support this 100% for the next two years at least and this is THE platform". The way it seems.. it's just another hacked together device. No I haven't seen it, but they haven't bothered announcing it before now... it feels like after a week of every company on the planet bragging about their Windows 8 tablets... this is just and afterthought.
I can go on for a while... but as I said... I've been hoping they'll do this for years... too bad they'll probably screw it up to avoid hurting the feelings of their hardware partners like HP, ASUS, Dell etc...
I went to a high school where we had a great administration in New York and things were kept under control. We had all the freedom to do whatever we wanted but the administration made sure that we had more to gain through learning and behaving that otherwise. No police state... no zero tolerance bullshit. Just a great school with great teachers...
then I moved to Florida... and I saw how the other 90% lives.
Let's first be honest... the Florida educational system is among the worst in the entire world. I first started high school in Westbury, NY where it was common for the average student to have completed... with college credit calculus 1 as well as AP English. The principle demanded high academic achievement from his students. He cared less about standardized tests and focused entirely on educating the students. We had places on school grounds to smoke, we were allowed to leave campus during lunch etc... We earned his trust and generally deserved it. As a result, he got state and federal budgets to build computer and engineering labs that were beyond most universities in quality.
When I moved to Florida, things were much different. When my father pulled up to the admissions office with me, there were two police patrol cars parked out front of the principles office. When we went in, I asked "Why are there police cars here?" The principle told me, the school had two full time police officers on campus. I asked her "Do you have such big problems at your school that this is justified?" and she informed me in so many words that apparently the administration was incapable of controlling their own school and therefore needed all the help the could get. Students kept trying to leave school grounds during the day and they were generally unruly and there were major issues with racial "wars" on the campus. Then she continued to inform me about how there was a pizza hut in the cafeteria and that they were one of the top rated schools in Pinellas county. And yet, the most advanced math they offered was trigonometry and that students are allowed (in fact punished if the don't) use calculators on exams. The teacher of the course was named "Coach Nick" and he spent about 50% of each class hitting on the cheerleaders in the front of the class and yapping about how "He would have gone pro... but".
Frankly, there are good public schools and piss poor ones. Apparently in Florida, the schools have terrible budgets and generally favor business administrators as opposed to educators for leadership positions. The voting majority... you know... those wrinkled up prune-like things with blue hair prefer the tax money to be spent on things like prisons as opposed to schools since having a place to send those uneducated, unruly brats when they leave school is more effective than educating them so they can be productive members of society. See the problem is, prisons solve the problem now, schools take 7-10 years to improve the situation and they'll be dead by then. If you ask them "What about their grand children?"... well that's easy... "They live in Michigan".
The poster above said "maybe he should be sent to school so that he can get taught by qualified educators", my experience in Florida suggests this means a private school. In the entire Dunedin High School which had a huge number of students and teachers, there were only a handful of "Qualified" educators.
I in fact was suspended for two weeks for walking off campus to go somewhere I could get a healthy lunch as opposed to the stuff which has made America fat. I said "Fuck that" and was suspended for two more weeks. I then dropped out, got my GED and went to the Junior College instead.
I gave up system level programming as a career since I was tired of my hobby and career being the same thing... it meant that for the last 30 years of my life (I'm not that old.... just started young), I have spent a minimum of 8 hours a day 7 days a week... often on vacations too in front of a screen and with no social life. I moved into teaching Cisco networking which I'm finding to be really fun and fulfilling.... I have had insanely good results... I am teaching my fourth course this week and so far I'm already setting new records for evaluations at the end of each week since I have a real passion for it. And oddly, I am making more money (2-3 times as much) as I was making when I actually made Cisco products Doh!
:)
That said... I spend a huge amount of time trying to figure out how to teach topics that are "advanced computing" related to people who need it fed to them in small words and made as simple as possible. I create analogies for things like understanding binary by making an imaginary currency called Binaries (sounds like dinaries) which come in coins starting at one and doubling for each denomination and ask them to make change and put the coins in the proper drawers (which happen to start empty) of a cash register without using the same coin twice. When you remove the math aspect from it and make it a simple task which they have done each time they visit a new country with a new currency they stop being afraid of it and move on.
Programming is often easiest to teach to non-programmers by asking people to "write a program" telling someone how to get from the airport to their house. Things like "If Shell gas station on opposite corner from me and hours of opening are from 6am to 11pm, then turn left". To describe functions, I would ask them to place each actual part of the directions on separate page of a document... mix them up and then on a single page, create a master document which refers to each page as a function to produce the program flow. Do the same with making dough for bread... "Kneed bread violently for 10 minutes"... "If the dough has dried out... add a sprinkle of water." "If the dough is too moist or is sticking to the cooking surface, add a little flour", "Repeat previous two tasks". "Loop back to the kneeding process if the dough has too many bubbles". etc...
I think two hours of this kind of instruction at lunch is enough to teach structured programming. Object oriented programming would require a much longer post
The top rated private schools are often top rated because they drill for standardized exams. :(
I know a huge number of people who went to private schools not because mom and dad were motivated but because it was fashionable. It can easily go both ways.
That said... if you find a private school who boots kids out who don't meet certain academic requirements... even if the kids parents are rich an powerful, this is a great option. That way, if your students are hurting the rest of the class, you can call the parents and they'll quickly sort out the problems.
I actually really like middle class private schools as opposed to upper class ones since middle class ones generally have students whose parents sent them there because of academic reasoning as opposed to fashion.
haha sorry... too little too late from me. I haven't check mail in ... forever :)
:(
Thank you for posing that question, I regularly attack people for simply bashing governments and not offering a alternative. After all, it's easy being a critic, you just have to point out the problems and not offer solutions.
I didn't know the details of the attack, but like most "news worthy items" the details were unimportant to the reporter of the article I read. So I was short in information. I have worked with/for (subcontractor of a subcontractor twice removed or something) and found that it's often a miracle Lockheed could accomplish anything. In order to score new projects, the people who would have been worth anything to begin with were taking off of projects regularly in order to be placed on new projects since the second Lockheed scored one project, they'd start posturing for the next claiming "You'll have the brainiacs that did this on your project"... so they'd get at most 3 months on each project. What's left afterwards are burnt out guys or guys that weren't really that good to brag about in a sales room.
I have to admit, I don't know an alternative. Usually I'm quick to think of something, but given the scale of a project like this, I'd say there's no company suited for this and it would be far more intelligent to focus on having in-house resources for this. People may complain about "big government", but in reality, in situations like this one, often the best solution is simply to do it yourself.
I am a system level developer who has implemented encryption technologies used in top-secret environments. Also I have worked on mobile device development at a system level for many years. I can't detail my credentials, but for as much as anyone else on Slashdot can be considered reliable, ... well you take it from there.
... and often did.
1) So far as I know, the only "smart phone" OS which has been "properly audited" was the specific versions of BlackBerry OS which is used by Obama. This does not include all versions of Blackberry OS... only the versions which have been specifically audited and approved for use on his phone. This does not mean that the OS is secure, the NSA audit on the code was performed too quickly for my tastes. It just means that the majority of "obvious holes" are not present. This completely rules out the newer QNX based OS for Blackberry since there is absolutely no possible way that much code could be properly audited in the time which it has been available. On top of that code audits are only a small part of what you need to do to secure a few million lines of code which is heavily communication oriented. Of course, running a simply security auditor on the OS helps as well, but I wouldn't bank on that either. An OS needs years of testing at a single revision before it can be truly solid.
2) Android may or may not be secure. It's extremely unlikely. If however you want Android and can't live without it, make sure to use only OS images which are hash check verified (MD5, SHA...) from Google directly. If the phone can't run the stock OS, DON'T USE IT! The reason for this is that the OEMs often update and modify code before putting it on the phones. They are feature oriented, not security oriented. Google Nexus would be a decent choice for this.
3) Don't even consider Windows, Symbian or iOS based phones. iOS is the safest of those three, but lacks pretty much all the features you're interested in. So far as I know, Apple doesn't even care about a "trusted platform" as the cost of maintaining a trusted platform is WAY TOO HIGH and would never yield the profits Apple demands from products. Windows and Symbian just aren't about trusted in the first place and the serious short comings in the Symbian "Development process" make it far too susceptible to being able to be hacked. Without decent development tools and kernel level debugging (which Symbian simply lacks for the most part) it's not possible to harden an OS. Also since Symbian never made use of things like "Test driven development", any change in one place could wreck 100 things elsewhere
4) Never EVER allow users to install apps... ESPECIALLY ON A JAVA PHONE meaning Blackberry or Android. This is because Java is insanely easy to hack. Yes, I know Oracle and Sun say otherwise... but I recall Yugo also calling their cars safe. Voluntarily installing an app which replaces the class loader on the system is enough to hack the entire thing. There are hundreds of other ways to hack Java which is obvious to me an others that can be exploited with a simple malicious chunk of code in an app. Also, since Java based platforms don't generally allow sandboxing, the apps all kind of have access to override system resources and interfere with each other.
While I personally despise Blackberry having tried it a few times and felt like I was using junk, if you must have these features, you should use their hardened and audited system.
Not the QNX version... too new... too many hacks... not enough testing etc...
He might end up with Blackberry based on QNX which is not the secure BlackBerry which the NSA and those guys cleared for Bama.
Blackberry on QNX is a thoroughly untested system based on a nearly full rewrite of the operating system which we all know suffered from severe rush to market syndrome. Meaning that there is no possible way a product which is almost certainly a million lines of code or more has been thoroughly tested for security. I mention in previous comments that QNX runs an in-house TCP/IP stack which almost certainly is exploitable. It runs in a separate process from the kernel, but it's still not the IP stacks used by millions and tested by every security lab on earth. The way you know for sure that it's got holes in it is that no one has reported holes on it. What this means is, no one has put it to the test yet. Or we could be expected to simply believe that QNX wrote every line of code perfect and they never had a bug... ever.
I've worked with QNX (with them directly on project with many many developers on their side as well as mine) and learned that QNX, just like other companies is not perfect. The only reason why they're secure is that we don't know what the holes are yet.
Let's not forget the Java platform which really does make it wonderfully hackable. Java provides so many possible ways to install rootkits and trojans that unless they found a way to run each app in a separate process, it's hopeless.
So... if people want to steer the reader well... they should recommend the old Blackberry stuff... it'll be years before we can consider this to be secure.
Pre-QNX BB was pretty secure... but with the whole rewrite, there is absolutely no possible way a device with that much code changed and that little use so far can be secure. I justify it above.
The new BB based on QNX is not tested for security yet. Yes... they did internal testing and all that and QNX has a history for being secure for the most part, but with several million new lines of code to compose the full rewrite of black berry's software, there's no possible way they could have tested that phone for any reasonable level of security in that time.
Also please keep in mind that QNX develops their own TCP/IP stack which I personally have used for about 20 years. And after having access to the OS source (and having worked closely with QNX on software projects for years) I don't feel confident that their stack is as secure as they say it is. Remember that QNX is one of the hardest operating systems on the planet to perform system level debugging on. This makes it very hard to properly audit the stack. It is however a user-mode stack which means there's less chances of kernel level "root kits".
Also, the phone is based on Java which is not very hard to hack... a simple "friendly" app can easily replace the JAVA class loader and pretty much run key loggers and such without a problem.
The only thing which appears to make BB secure is their advertising. They tell us all how secure they are and we feel secure with them. Without a proper code audit, I wouldn't ever consider them secure.
1) Who compiled it (a release manager at the OEM who is the lowest paid guy on the team)?
2) Who reviewed it (no one)?
3) Who audited it (no one)?
4) Is the OS signed and locked to the phone (nope)?
5) Can an OEM slipstream device drivers or system level code onto the device (yes)?
6) Can app developers slipstream drivers or system level code onto the device (usually)?
Unless you can be 100% sure that the guy who compiled release of the OS was actually aware of what they were doing with regards to security (less than 10% chance), it is entirely possible the phone should not be considered secured.
Both you and the poster above are kinda screwey in terms of thinking.
First of all... while implementing security code in VHDL or Verilog is possible and has been done, the CPU is just not a big risk in this case. You can use a CPU from a company you're sure is fishy and so long as the software above it is written properly, it should make no difference. It's not really even a matter of cost. Encryption is a software feature... security in general is software oriented. In a system such as Android where the processor itself doesn't even run the executable code but instead runs code JITed for the processor, it's even less relevant. I can write 10 pages on this to prove my point, but it's a waste of time.
On the other hand, there's nothing that says that a second microcontroller couldn't be hidden in the phone which runs a second network session in the background. Still, there is too much dependence on software and things like keys and such that would make it impossible for this to be an issue if the software is written properly.
It would just be stupid to waste time developing a malicious CPU if you can just install what you want on the phone itself as software.
Score a major government security contract?
Never understood why the hell companies like Lockheed score multi billion dollar deals that they are thoroughly unsuited for.
CABAC doesn't scale well in massively threaded environments that is true. However there are ways to avoid the issues involved and this really isn't the issue either. It's not the CABAC so much as the bit stream writing for the most part. CABAC scales fine if you parallelize it across slices. Of course no modern encoders make use of multiple slices per field/frame, so it's more of an issue of whether latency is an issue. You can run parallel CABAC encoders by buffering frames.
The real problem especially when dealing with a NVidia vs. ATI issue is that while floating point performance on these two GPUs rock, the NVidia chips have piss poor support for shift/rotate etc... bit level operations on internal registers which makes reading and writing bit streams utterly painful at best. The CABAC code obviously takes a pretty severe hit from this. A solution to this problem is a single shared table across parallel threads for all 8 bit position states. Though, this will likely still suck since there will be huge numbers of mutexes on the table for the lookup and the table is just too large to duplicate for each core. But on the NVidia, binary manipulation operations seriously are lacking where ATI has had those sorted out for a while. This is also why doing hash brute force cracking on an NVidia appears much slower than on a ATI.
I personally use NVidia for games and ATI for computing.
People have mentioned electricity and such. They have mentioned the utility of the smaller drives etc...
:)
:)
Let's be frank... any home built PC with the ability to flood a gigabit Ethernet line or two will actually be quite power hungry. These Atom based NAS boxes aren't actually using straight ITX Atom boards, they have precisely what is needed, nothing more, nothing less. They are extremely power efficient as well.
FreeNAS, OpenFiler and several others out there are awesome tools. I have a FreeNAS server myself... though my home file server is running Windows 7 with 8x2TB with a SAS RAID controller, my iSCSI box for VMWare is running FreeNAS. I love it... but to be honest, it is not power efficient. If I spent 6 months to a year focussed on tuning FreeNAS to this specific system, I might be able to get power usage and the function set up to what I could have gotten from QNAP for example for a few hundred bucks.
For my super important file storage, I will very likely this week, after years of FreeNAS simply buy a two drive box with 3TB drives in RAID1 and put it on a different floor of the house. My network in the house is now made up of multiple Cisco Catalyst gigabit switches with four cable etherchannel between each floor. So, a little NAS with a RAID1 that supports etherchannel would be great for backing up parts of my server
No... my house doesn't look like a mess... I have very clean cabling and nice looking racks that blend with the furniture
Next you'll start bragging about how Metro on a tablet kicks the crap out of pretty much all the other tablet OSes (been running it as such since December and ... well it does, have the other too... use them as coffee cup coasters now), and how the biggest VoiP provider in Europe delivers touch screen telephones running on Wintel and how Microsoft products currently have the best documentation (start with MSDN for developers and move through all the other products and when that's not good enough look to Microsoft press) out there. Or how like after 28 years, X11 still doesn't have a reliable way to configure network adapters without modifying the /etc directory or how after playing catch-up for years, DirectX passed and left behind OpenGL in features and consistency.... hell, you need to read two books on OpenGL these days just to learn the "best practice" method of uploading a vertex list.
Pretty sure that while we're all talking about how irrelevant they are in modern culture, they're just sitting back and letting us all buy their products and saying "Well... we'd rather be considered irrelevant than evil... Google and be evil... we'll just take the money and be happy and chug along making new stuff". I think that Microsoft's fading to behind the scenes might have been the most profitable thing they ever did. Let's face it, the justice department is pretty much leaving them alone, anti-trust suits have faded away, they're just making money like they always have and "Don't be evil Google" and "Think Different Apple" are now the new companies to be paying out fortunes in settlements while Microsoft just keeps one making products and selling them.
Holy shit, I just read your remark after the one I wrote. Then I realized that we probably both subconsciously wrote using vocabulary that would hopefully clearly differentiate ourselves from the "Walmart People" in the eyes of "our peers" haha. I'm tempted to go back and write it in Walmart English now that I realized it.
People still think that "Survival of the fittest" or "Only the strong will survive" is the entire premise of natural selection. These are obviously over simplifications which completely fail to describe natural selection but has been adopted by many that in theory should have been selected out long ago to boost their egos. I am not referring to anyone that has posted thus far as opposed to making a simple observation, so please don't see this as bait.
If I were to provide my 2 cents on this topic (which it appears I will), I would postulate that to a certain extent, we are going through a transitional period. While the specimens of humanity that are clearly most suited for environmental adaptation have focused on meeting the market demand to prolong life and attempt to eliminate natural death, people classically selected out through illness, disease and general stupidity on their own behalf are being protected from these dangers and surviving. It is believed that the human race will reproduce more rapidly in areas of higher mortality rates. This is to guarantee the survival of the race. People who were classically at the highest risk of death from disease would also reproduce at the greatest rate in order to perpetuate the race. So, families who have a long history of dieing off from any number of any number of environmentally induced issues will produce a gaggle of children with the hopes that one or two will survive. But since we have eliminated most of the environmental threats to these people, they are living through all these former perils. However since their instinct of survival of the race convinces them to reproduce more rapidly without proper consideration to the lower mortality rate, a great deal more of what formally was considered fodder, are surviving, hence the previous poster's comments to Walmart people.
Women who are pregnant read magazines that educate them as to how to protect their wombs. The articles they read state things like "Doing this increases the chance of first trimester spontaneous abortion by 300%". I can't possibly imagine how a comment like that can be made, there are an infinite number of variables that are involved in gestation, to suggest any single event can increase the risks of spontaneous abortion in the first trimester is just plain rubbish. What is worse, are we talking about 1 in a million to 3 in a million? Are we talking 1 in 10 to 3 in 10? It doesn't say, just says by 300%. Yet, women will instantly stop doing whatever it says they shouldn't do to avoid that.
Nature is no longer selecting out "Walmart people" since we have averted most of the dangers they have faced in the past. In fact, we have even reached a point where people such as my sister (a typical Walmart patron) now survive and bring additional offspring into the world where she attempts to protected them from everything to an extremity. For example, her children were not allowed to play with wooden toys like Lincoln Logs since they might get a splinter from them. She is entirely incapable of rational and intelligent thought, but thanks to medicine and excessive warning labels, her line will perpetuate. Don't get me wrong, I love my sister, but I am a realist in this regard.
We have protected these people to extreme levels and they are still reproducing at a rate that would protect their line against extinction. The "adapted" member of the species on the other hand reproduce at a more conservative rate since their instincts tell them that they'll experience a level closer to 95 out of 100 offspring surviving in their sub-species.
As a result, what is actually happening is that the "Walmart people" are actually in a major transition period of evolution. They are reproducing at a rate based on the fact that until less than 50 years ago, their chances of survival were much worse. It will require a few more generations before their over-reproduction becomes directly detrimental to their chances of survival and they will either be selected out or they will decrease their rate of repro
3. you can ask a knowledgeable staff member about the products
a) If you know enough about computers to be knowledgeable, you sure as hell will have a job making more money than Best Buy would pay.
b) The guys selling the TVs don't know the first thing about them. For example... do they actually know what makes LCD better than plasma or the other way around? Do they even have the slightest clue how either technology works? Do they know anything at all about what the contrast ratio actually means? Do they even know enough about Ohm's law to understand cost savings on power? Do they have the slightest clue why top and bottom isn't as good as side by side for 3D? Absolutely not. All they know is what is written on the sheets next to the TVs and from what they watch while at work.
c) Geek squad? Really? Personally, I want a nerd to fix problems... geeks are just outcasts posing as nerds in order to fit into some community where they could get some respect instead of just being geeks. This is one of the best names ever. When they named it, I don't think they had any idea how accurate it was to call them that. Can they fix some computer problems? Sure... anyone can change parts until it works and reinstall Windows. But frankly, their drivers license is more impressive than their computer skills. Rule #1... never ever trust a computer guy desperate enough to wear a stupid looking uniform to work. It's like asking the guy at the drive through window at McDonalds to fix your PC. And in that case, you might have more success.
When a company buys network equipment, if they need help from someone knowledgeable, they bring in someone from Cisco or Juniper who have actual certifications which require you to have at least a decent understanding of networking design and architecture to get. And by decent, I mean, they actually know what each component does and more or less how it works. Hell, you have to even understand TCP windowing to get the entry level certification.
When a consumer buys a TV which costs them more proportionately to their income than a few Ciscos costs a company, they trust a guy who's only qualification is a blue shirt tell them what they need or want.
So how would Best Buy actually fix this problem? Teach the guys selling TV how scaling engines work so they can better understand why the scaling engine of one model of TV is better than another? Make the guy at the front desk of the Geek Squad wear the shirt and in the back find "qualified" bench techs who actually are willing to fix PCs for a living and pay them appropriately? Hire former appliance repairmen to sell the white ware? It would be a start, but it would almost certainly bankrupt them faster.
Personally, I found that using a Samsung Series 7 Slate with Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Microsoft One Note is pretty damn impressive and it does a pretty good job of also transcribing to text from hand writing afterwards.
I know it's all Microsofty which is a anti-slashdot thing, but really, I've been using this for a few months and I've been really pleased.
In a period of 10 minutes of me using my Windows 8 tablet to show someone some code I've been writing today, 3 people actually hopped online to buy themselves a Windows 8 tablet as well. They loved it because they could replace their Windows PC and their iPad with a device that weighs the same as an iPad 3.
:)
I actually feel like while Microsoft hasn't "Gotten it right!" on Windows 8, they've gotten it "A hell of a lot closer to right" than either Apple or Google did. Give it time and a few patches and I think they'll nail it.
Too bad... I don't know what to do with the iPads in my house anymore and I'm seriously considering Windows Phone now since Windows 8 is just so damn nice. And the fact that it runs iTunes and lets me keep everything but my games (which I never play) and TomTom, makes it perfect
Don't start counting any chickens... but yet... it won't take long before new PC sales pretty much flood the market with it.
I like that point better than most I've read here. It was well thought out. I have often been asked about who I'll vote for by people. I then explain that as an expatriate that did not establish a voting district before leaving, my vote is purely as part of the absenty counting which has no representation in the electoral college. Therefore, my vote is generally through attempting to educate others about my perspectives. To do this, I tend to try and help people choose the candidate they should want as opposed to the candidate I want. This way, I'm not stealing their vote but helping them to vote in the way that will best represent their needs and wants as opposed to simply voting for the guy with the nicest hair for example or that's part of the right party.
The ability to dismiss is an incredibly important feature of the American political system and it needs revision. Based on the original topic of the article and even your opening statement about lacking the expertise to make an informed decision based on who should in fact hold office based on the issues, I believe the system as it stands now makes it too easy to throw a person out of office before anything they have tried to accomplish actually is given a chance to work. People generally want instant gratification and instant improvements when a new president comes to office for example.
There is almost nothing a candidate can do prior to taking the presidency that will provide them enough information to actually make informed decisions regarding plans. They can make a plan to design a plan once they have the knowledge, but it's almost impossible to actually make a good plan without the actually experience from within the office. The exception would be if a vice president ran as the incumbent for the party and worked together with the president to prepare the plan before hand. Therefore, we have to assume that prior to coming into the presidential office, the plan is based mainly on intentions. Once the president comes to office, it's time to turn those intentions into a plan after learning about the presidential resources, liabilities and assets involved in making the plan happen. Unless you like hack and slash politics, the planning phase for the presidential programs should consume the first year of their term. Not only that, but teams of people should be assembled to identify what can go wrong with the plans and build contingencies for it.
The second year of office should be spent getting bills proposed, gaining support and passing them. With a good plan, it may be possible to pass laws without ear marks everywhere which, due to the insane financial crisis, Obama didn't have the luxury of on his initial bills. But he really should have had more time to get Obamacare right. By letting it be hacked and slashed by everyone who opposed it or wanted to tack something onto it, it was a bit of a mess. But if an entire year is devoted to just kissing asses, making back room shady deals and whatever else to pass the bills, then the third year will be about implementing them.
Now comes the real problem. The fourth year. It's utterly wasted. The president now has to spend all his time finding another country to fight to get the redneck vote (which is a HUGE vote). He has to raise money, make good on promises to big backers etc... he is in a position of power and he's forced to kiss rich peoples asses to raise money to get reelected. This is a terrible idea. What's worse is that he's being attacked by A LOT of people. He's losing support. Unless the other candidate is a total waste of skin who as no chance of winning, opposition in congress will do whatever is possible to stonewall the president to gain favor with the other candidate they are betting on. They'll even stonewall the president to make it harder for him to do anything in his last year before the election in order to make him look bad.
Instead of two 4 years terms, a president should have a single 8 term with something like a vote of no confidence in place which makes it near