Unix-like operating systems use file attributes to indicate special stuff like devices and pipes. Do a "ls -l/dev" and you will see what I mean. They also usually have access permissions set up to prevent access by anyone but a root process.
At least try a different Mozilla-based browser. Seamonkey works well for me on both Mac and Win7. It's basically what became of the original Mozilla after Firefox forked away from it and then "forked up" by trying to become a Chrome clone.
I have "Allow documents to use other fonts" unchecked and read everything using Lucida Gothic. One big reason for this is I hate reading small point size serif fonts on the screen. This subverts the few web sites like Gawker that use custom fonts for UI icons, but fuck them. Everybody else gets along just fine without using custom icon fonts.
This is what I call the "85-85" problem. For some reason, in the early 2Ks or so, it became a meme for blogs to display body text as 85% size 85% gray, and often on a non-white background. When I pick the text size in my web browser, that's because that's the size I want to read it at, not 85% of it. Contrast also matters for readability, and I don't want to read gray-on-gray text.
Even worse is when someone wants to be edgy with inverse text. I want my background lighter than the text because when reading on my laptop in the dark, I can just turn down the backlight. Inverse video subverts this, since most of the backlight is blocked, but only for the web page's text, and I can't read it without the backlight high enough that the rest of the white-on-black screen blinds me. I have a very nice black-on-gray custom CSS for hackaday, which is the worst offender of sites I regularly read. Sometimes I'll turn off the CSS style and read a page with oldskool Web 1.0 formatting.
Frankly, any job that could be automated has been long automated since the turn of the industrial revolution.
You missed one, customer-facing data entry work is being replaced by kiosks. The most recent development in that is burger flippers whining about pay are about to get replaced by kiosks that will reduce lines (you can keep multiple kiosks open when you couldn't afford to have extra cashiers), and increase accuracy (no more wrong orders because Laqueesha was thinking about her boyfriend and pressed the wrong key). There will probably still be a need for a single cashier to actually take cash money (mechanical cash acceptors are still not quite reliable enough for less than a big box store), but even most of the burger work might end up done by machine.
I've also worked on deep embedded stuff. Hell, some of the compilers don't even do C++ (looking at YOU IAR C/C++), so I wrote it in C.
Eh? I was mixing C and C++ in the same project in IAR five years ago, not just pure C++. Admittedly it was embedded, so I wasn't using STL or even heap objects, but the language was there and it worked fine. And unlike Microsoft, they actually admit that C99 exists. So you're going to have to 'splain your shit.
The right-angle Magsafe was a good idea, it solved the "in the lap" problem, but the rubber insulation they used for it didn't flex very well. A year or two of sitting on a couch using the same power supply every day (I kept an older one in the laptop bag) caused it to crack next to the connector. I took a piece of insulation from the cord to a broken power strip and cable-tied it around the end of the cord and... it started cracking at the end of the insulation, four inches down the cord.
Floppy disks were already way too small for anything useful by then, and the floppy disks you could buy after the late '90s sucked and were unreliable. (Source: me trying to install Slackware on floppies written by another computer, it seemed like half the time there would be a disk error on every disk.)
The real mistake they made was having no interface faster than 10Mbps Ethernet and 12Mbps USB. The original iMac was the last Mac to not have Firewire until they stopped making Firewire ports.
The sheer number of Retina-era MBPs is finally starting to drive the prices of 2010-2012 (the ones that can be upgraded to 16GB) into a useful price range. My best price so far has been $200 for a 2008 (?) 17" that was not working. Turns out that its heat sink didn't have a heat sensor on it. I'm guessing that it was overheating and some moron thought he needed a new heat sink (instead of just new thermal paste) so he got one off of ebay that didn't have the sensor. I was able to wedge in a heat sink from a 15" scraptop donor for now until I can get around to ordering a sensor for it.
In spite of the fiddly nature of some of the parts, and especially the construction of the earliest Unibody MBPs (holy shit the original 15" with the removable battery is a mess inside), the later ones are quite repairable from spare parts as long as the motherboard is still working. But replacing the keyboard looks like a major pain in the ass unless you swap it along with the top case. (I'd love to take the keyboard from that 15" and put it on my old 17", the ribbon cables even look like they might be in the same place.)
In my opinion, the loss of Steve Jobs is clearly why everything from Apple started sucking after 2012. It's the "Disney Effect", where WDC kept churning out animated musicals for years, because that's what they were making when Walt died. In Apple's case, it's the obsession with thin, even in "Pro" product lines.
If they had simply kept the 17", even without a Retina screen, I would have bought one by now. Now I've got a late-2011 17" with a broken GPU that I am finally about to have the time to get it sent off to someone who can replace the stupid chip. (It's apparently not a lead-free BGA problem, it's the connections inside the GPU chip itself, supposedly you can heat them to a bit less than the solder melt temperature and they will work again for a while before failing again. Nvidia made a bad batch of chips in 2011-2012.)
Nah, what happens is that they make a revision in 6-12 months that fixes some glaring deficiency of the first version of the major re-design. For example, the first Intel MacBook Pro had a 32-bit-only CPU (basically a Core 1), then six months later they put in a proper Core 2 Duo CPU. And the Unibody went through many upgrades while being in the same basic case design. There's a big difference between 2008 and 2012 versions of the pre-Retina Unibody.
I have acquired three 2010-2012 Mac Minis (the 2010 is the one that still has an optical drive and only goes to 8GB RAM), one of which is the 4-core i7 version. I mostly use them remotely via screen sharing and ssh.
I still have not purchased a MacBook Pro newer than 2012, but have instead acquired a few more "backup" laptops (and Magsafe-1 power supplies) as the prices have become affordable. Being able to upgrade most of them to 16GB of RAM (when Apple sold new computers with 4GB and 8GB soldered) has kept such old models still relevant. Intel CPUs not getting significantly better, as happened with the P4 to Core transition, also contributes to computers that old being useful. The main issue becomes the lack of a modern GPU, but most of those computers never had a GPU anyhow, other than the Intel built-in.
I had to wait out Apple's (very bad) computers in the '90s (I had a Power Computing tower to get me through that time), and now I wait out Apple's fixation on thin-uber-alles and glued-together non-upgradeable but shiny crap, in hopes that sanity will return.
We're seeing that effect already in Venezuela, thanks to the price bubble a few years back funding shale and fracking development in the US. I don't think the Mideast will end up quite as bad (monarchy vs the typical Central/South American charismatic egotistic leaders), but that's what happens when your economy coasts on oil profits too long and too hard. The Saudis are at least smart enough to see it coming and slow things down.
But do you know why electricity is cheaper? Because "in many places", gasoline/diesel is taxed well over 100%. In Texas right now, gasoline has been averaging around $2.00/gal if you average it over the past year or so. Taxes are probably around 40-50cents/gal of that price, and station profits are around 5-10 cents/gal. In Europe, prices are over a dollar a liter, with approx. 4 liters to the gallon. So what costs about $2/gal to refine and deliver (adding a bit because Texas is on the low end of costs) costs $4-$6 (or even more) at the pump.
Some of those taxes go to road maintenance, and without them, that money has to come from somewhere else. Look forward to EV mileage taxes in a few years once they become a more than insignificant part of what's on the road.
I previously had a small SUV that I took from about 29K to about 230K miles. At that point, really the only thing still working was the engine. The A/C used old Freon and had been too leaky to even bother to repair, the door latch to the driver side door had broken and I had to enter on the passenger side, the driver side window mounts had broken and the window fell into the door just before I got a new SUV. And the paint had long flaked off (crappy '90s GM paint job) I don't remember the condition of the driver seat.
My current SUV is now at 230K miles, the engine is not the original and leaks oil, the driver side seat is a mess, but about 3-4 years ago I had the A/C repaired and it might have been recharged once since then.
So basically, after about 200,000 miles, the interior and body of a typical passenger vehicle are likely to start falling apart. You can only open and close a door so many times before it starts to wear out. Commercial vehicles may get more miles, but they are built to last longer.
Because by that point, you're not expected to do long division and multiplication for every problem, you are only expected to know which numbers to multiply and divide, etc. Not that problems can't be made to avoid math that requires a calculator, but it's not just students that are lazy.
Having gone to college in the '80s, I can't imagine why you would need a graphing function on a calculator when taking a test, or even for doing homework. A plain old Casio non-programmable scientific/financial calculator should be more than sufficient. Even that algebraic entry crap is excessive.
I'm sort of okay with using a screen that size like adding machine tape to make sure you entered stuff correctly, but you should still be writing down intermediate results most of the time anyhow.
1: mediocre programmer guy wants to check the keystrokes that affect volume control, adds a keylogger to the code for debugging
2: poor version control, or a total lack thereof, combined with lack of code review, allows "temporary" debugging keylogger code to become part of and remain enabled in main-line production code
3: someone eventually discovers it and SHTF
Then maybe you should take advantage of the free market and start looking for a better-paying job elsewhere. If your company won't give you a raise, you can give yourself one by changing employers. Assuming, of course, that you are actually worth more. Capitalism doesn't guarantee that you are always underpaid.
The reason the original PowerPC transition had such bad performance was that 7.5.x (and I think 8.x as well) still had most of the OS written in 68K code. Microsoft has been doing the ARM thing long enough that they don't have legacy binaries to deal with.
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Unix-like operating systems use file attributes to indicate special stuff like devices and pipes. Do a "ls -l /dev" and you will see what I mean. They also usually have access permissions set up to prevent access by anyone but a root process.
At least try a different Mozilla-based browser. Seamonkey works well for me on both Mac and Win7. It's basically what became of the original Mozilla after Firefox forked away from it and then "forked up" by trying to become a Chrome clone.
I have "Allow documents to use other fonts" unchecked and read everything using Lucida Gothic. One big reason for this is I hate reading small point size serif fonts on the screen. This subverts the few web sites like Gawker that use custom fonts for UI icons, but fuck them. Everybody else gets along just fine without using custom icon fonts.
This is what I call the "85-85" problem. For some reason, in the early 2Ks or so, it became a meme for blogs to display body text as 85% size 85% gray, and often on a non-white background. When I pick the text size in my web browser, that's because that's the size I want to read it at, not 85% of it. Contrast also matters for readability, and I don't want to read gray-on-gray text.
Even worse is when someone wants to be edgy with inverse text. I want my background lighter than the text because when reading on my laptop in the dark, I can just turn down the backlight. Inverse video subverts this, since most of the backlight is blocked, but only for the web page's text, and I can't read it without the backlight high enough that the rest of the white-on-black screen blinds me. I have a very nice black-on-gray custom CSS for hackaday, which is the worst offender of sites I regularly read. Sometimes I'll turn off the CSS style and read a page with oldskool Web 1.0 formatting.
ruling that patent infringement suits can be filed only in courts located in the jurisdiction where the targeted company is incorporated
I don't think that's going to work like you think it will.
After all, that's where Sheldon Cooper comes from.
Frankly, any job that could be automated has been long automated since the turn of the industrial revolution.
You missed one, customer-facing data entry work is being replaced by kiosks. The most recent development in that is burger flippers whining about pay are about to get replaced by kiosks that will reduce lines (you can keep multiple kiosks open when you couldn't afford to have extra cashiers), and increase accuracy (no more wrong orders because Laqueesha was thinking about her boyfriend and pressed the wrong key). There will probably still be a need for a single cashier to actually take cash money (mechanical cash acceptors are still not quite reliable enough for less than a big box store), but even most of the burger work might end up done by machine.
I've also worked on deep embedded stuff. Hell, some of the compilers don't even do C++ (looking at YOU IAR C/C++), so I wrote it in C.
Eh? I was mixing C and C++ in the same project in IAR five years ago, not just pure C++. Admittedly it was embedded, so I wasn't using STL or even heap objects, but the language was there and it worked fine. And unlike Microsoft, they actually admit that C99 exists. So you're going to have to 'splain your shit.
"Parallel universe" makes people think of the trope.
I think "perpendicular universe" would be better, and it's probably more accurate since parallel things don't intersect.
There wasn't a 2013 17". The last one was the late-2011 model, which they sold until they ran out in mid-2012.
The right-angle Magsafe was a good idea, it solved the "in the lap" problem, but the rubber insulation they used for it didn't flex very well. A year or two of sitting on a couch using the same power supply every day (I kept an older one in the laptop bag) caused it to crack next to the connector. I took a piece of insulation from the cord to a broken power strip and cable-tied it around the end of the cord and... it started cracking at the end of the insulation, four inches down the cord.
Floppy disks were already way too small for anything useful by then, and the floppy disks you could buy after the late '90s sucked and were unreliable. (Source: me trying to install Slackware on floppies written by another computer, it seemed like half the time there would be a disk error on every disk.)
The real mistake they made was having no interface faster than 10Mbps Ethernet and 12Mbps USB. The original iMac was the last Mac to not have Firewire until they stopped making Firewire ports.
The sheer number of Retina-era MBPs is finally starting to drive the prices of 2010-2012 (the ones that can be upgraded to 16GB) into a useful price range. My best price so far has been $200 for a 2008 (?) 17" that was not working. Turns out that its heat sink didn't have a heat sensor on it. I'm guessing that it was overheating and some moron thought he needed a new heat sink (instead of just new thermal paste) so he got one off of ebay that didn't have the sensor. I was able to wedge in a heat sink from a 15" scraptop donor for now until I can get around to ordering a sensor for it.
In spite of the fiddly nature of some of the parts, and especially the construction of the earliest Unibody MBPs (holy shit the original 15" with the removable battery is a mess inside), the later ones are quite repairable from spare parts as long as the motherboard is still working. But replacing the keyboard looks like a major pain in the ass unless you swap it along with the top case. (I'd love to take the keyboard from that 15" and put it on my old 17", the ribbon cables even look like they might be in the same place.)
In my opinion, the loss of Steve Jobs is clearly why everything from Apple started sucking after 2012. It's the "Disney Effect", where WDC kept churning out animated musicals for years, because that's what they were making when Walt died. In Apple's case, it's the obsession with thin, even in "Pro" product lines.
If they had simply kept the 17", even without a Retina screen, I would have bought one by now. Now I've got a late-2011 17" with a broken GPU that I am finally about to have the time to get it sent off to someone who can replace the stupid chip. (It's apparently not a lead-free BGA problem, it's the connections inside the GPU chip itself, supposedly you can heat them to a bit less than the solder melt temperature and they will work again for a while before failing again. Nvidia made a bad batch of chips in 2011-2012.)
Nah, what happens is that they make a revision in 6-12 months that fixes some glaring deficiency of the first version of the major re-design. For example, the first Intel MacBook Pro had a 32-bit-only CPU (basically a Core 1), then six months later they put in a proper Core 2 Duo CPU. And the Unibody went through many upgrades while being in the same basic case design. There's a big difference between 2008 and 2012 versions of the pre-Retina Unibody.
I have acquired three 2010-2012 Mac Minis (the 2010 is the one that still has an optical drive and only goes to 8GB RAM), one of which is the 4-core i7 version. I mostly use them remotely via screen sharing and ssh.
I still have not purchased a MacBook Pro newer than 2012, but have instead acquired a few more "backup" laptops (and Magsafe-1 power supplies) as the prices have become affordable. Being able to upgrade most of them to 16GB of RAM (when Apple sold new computers with 4GB and 8GB soldered) has kept such old models still relevant. Intel CPUs not getting significantly better, as happened with the P4 to Core transition, also contributes to computers that old being useful. The main issue becomes the lack of a modern GPU, but most of those computers never had a GPU anyhow, other than the Intel built-in.
I had to wait out Apple's (very bad) computers in the '90s (I had a Power Computing tower to get me through that time), and now I wait out Apple's fixation on thin-uber-alles and glued-together non-upgradeable but shiny crap, in hopes that sanity will return.
We're seeing that effect already in Venezuela, thanks to the price bubble a few years back funding shale and fracking development in the US. I don't think the Mideast will end up quite as bad (monarchy vs the typical Central/South American charismatic egotistic leaders), but that's what happens when your economy coasts on oil profits too long and too hard. The Saudis are at least smart enough to see it coming and slow things down.
But do you know why electricity is cheaper? Because "in many places", gasoline/diesel is taxed well over 100%. In Texas right now, gasoline has been averaging around $2.00/gal if you average it over the past year or so. Taxes are probably around 40-50cents/gal of that price, and station profits are around 5-10 cents/gal. In Europe, prices are over a dollar a liter, with approx. 4 liters to the gallon. So what costs about $2/gal to refine and deliver (adding a bit because Texas is on the low end of costs) costs $4-$6 (or even more) at the pump.
Some of those taxes go to road maintenance, and without them, that money has to come from somewhere else. Look forward to EV mileage taxes in a few years once they become a more than insignificant part of what's on the road.
I previously had a small SUV that I took from about 29K to about 230K miles. At that point, really the only thing still working was the engine. The A/C used old Freon and had been too leaky to even bother to repair, the door latch to the driver side door had broken and I had to enter on the passenger side, the driver side window mounts had broken and the window fell into the door just before I got a new SUV. And the paint had long flaked off (crappy '90s GM paint job) I don't remember the condition of the driver seat.
My current SUV is now at 230K miles, the engine is not the original and leaks oil, the driver side seat is a mess, but about 3-4 years ago I had the A/C repaired and it might have been recharged once since then.
So basically, after about 200,000 miles, the interior and body of a typical passenger vehicle are likely to start falling apart. You can only open and close a door so many times before it starts to wear out. Commercial vehicles may get more miles, but they are built to last longer.
But think of the rainbow tables you could load into it! The NSA should be all over this.
Because by that point, you're not expected to do long division and multiplication for every problem, you are only expected to know which numbers to multiply and divide, etc. Not that problems can't be made to avoid math that requires a calculator, but it's not just students that are lazy.
Having gone to college in the '80s, I can't imagine why you would need a graphing function on a calculator when taking a test, or even for doing homework. A plain old Casio non-programmable scientific/financial calculator should be more than sufficient. Even that algebraic entry crap is excessive.
I'm sort of okay with using a screen that size like adding machine tape to make sure you entered stuff correctly, but you should still be writing down intermediate results most of the time anyhow.
From what I saw yesterday, the "explanation" is:
1: mediocre programmer guy wants to check the keystrokes that affect volume control, adds a keylogger to the code for debugging
2: poor version control, or a total lack thereof, combined with lack of code review, allows "temporary" debugging keylogger code to become part of and remain enabled in main-line production code
3: someone eventually discovers it and SHTF
In other words, Hanlon's Razor.
Then maybe you should take advantage of the free market and start looking for a better-paying job elsewhere. If your company won't give you a raise, you can give yourself one by changing employers. Assuming, of course, that you are actually worth more. Capitalism doesn't guarantee that you are always underpaid.
The reason the original PowerPC transition had such bad performance was that 7.5.x (and I think 8.x as well) still had most of the OS written in 68K code. Microsoft has been doing the ARM thing long enough that they don't have legacy binaries to deal with.