I really want an answer to the revenue question. It really is starting to feel like a free hit from a drug dealer. Sounds too good to be true, so what exactly is their long term plan for my computer?
My optimistic side does note that they currently get most of their revenue from new PC sales, and not from average Joe's upgrading OS's. So perhaps they are writing off the last ~10% of revenue to reduce the headache of XP and 7 users holding out when they try to cram a steaming pile of brand new MS UI's down our throat. Maybe now Metro will just show up as an update during the night and we'll have no option except to live with it.
I don't know why anyone with Windows 7 would want to jump on the "Free" download immediately. At a bare minimum you would think that waiting at least a few months for the dust to settle would be prudent. Just the fact that a nag message to opt-in came from an update should be enough to scare away anyone with half a wit.
Oxygen is a known oxidizer, so be sure to eat lots of antioxidant's when living or working around sources of oxygen.
All joking aside, Gallium-Arsenide as a compound is not all that dangerous. I wouldn't go eating it, but I have handled it many times and it does not require any special safety procedures. You already have GaAs parts inside of almost every cell phone. Virtually all output amplifiers to date are GaAs, with a minority of the low end phones using CMOS power amplifiers.
I am not sure why there is anything more on wasted on desktop processors given the last 6-7 years of only ~10 percent gains? We are expecting almost zero improvement in desktop performance with Skylake over the 4790K processors, and barely a power reduction. Billions were spent to get us almost nothing tangible.
Laptop machines have come a long way, but the desktop is stuck at 4 cores and no hint at anything but maybe 10% performance gains per year for the foreseeable future.
We are instead getting integrated crappy GPU's in flagship processors that will mostly never get utilized, and that crappy GPU is half the die area. I'd rather have the same die size with 6-8 cores, or more L2 cache, or almost anything else that I might actually make use of. Sadly, intel reserves those kinds of features for their much more expensive Xeon or "Extreme" branded lines.
It takes me 20 minutes to drive to work, 40 minutes to bike, and 55 minutes to take light rail. I have light rail stops just a 5 minute walk from both my house and from work, but there is a transfer between two different trains. So if it costs me an hour a day, I would rather spend an extra half hour with my kid morning and night than ride even a free light rail.
Biking gets me a workout that I desperately need, so I see that is time well spent for the days that I choose to ride.
Day laborers are often off the books, and do not pay into social security or get any sort of protections in old age. More often than not hiring day laborers is illegal.
When I see lines like "...that would be better for businesses, consumers, and all those workers themselves." I get VERY skeptical. Rarely do we all win.
Uber has all the smell and feel of Wiley Coyote staying in air by running fast enough and not looking down. Drivers are not making good enough wages once you factor in depreciation and other costs. A whole bunch of the usual costs of doing business are being swept under the rug, such as benefits, unemployment protection, and social security payments. Of these part time drivers who come and go, it means someone else is footing those bills (like their main employer, or the worker when their car dies).
1099 contractors are already an abused definition, just as exempt is. Adding more categories is just going to make it easier for corporations to arbitrage people's desire to put food on the table.
When forced into it (new baby, long crunch times at work) I have found that it is not an acquired skill. After more than even a couple weeks of only getting about 6 hours I end up miserable, constantly groggy, slow to recover from exercise, and with impaired complex reasoning.
Back in college I lived in Alaska. Over summer I worked in a student lab with near constant daylight. I found that my happy spot was to work about 16-20 hours, then sleep for about 10-12. It was not uncommon to sleep for 7-8, get up to eat something, then go back to sleep for another 3-4. It is not that I was being lazy, I was in fact working 60-80 hours every week and loving it.
Companies of this size are able to write of a lot of their own legislation to legalize their desired behavior. Once the tail wags the dog like that you can no longer use the letter of the law to argue that big companies like MS are being responsible corporate citizens.
The argument that we should all just voluntarily pa extra taxes is a weak and sad one. There are no examples I am aware of of ANY government system that operated on voluntary taxes. The goal of a tax system should be to evenly and fairly levy taxes to pay for those things that are cannot or should not be done by the private sector (yes, there is a whole bee's nest of arguments we can get into in that sentence).
In the end I don't enjoy paying taxes, but I am happy to do so. I am happy to pay my fair share to do so as long as there is a general sense that all you other bozos who benefit from roads, defense, national parks, and so much more are also are paying roughly their fair share as well. When I see Intel and Nike in my town getting special tax breaks while the local schools are struggling I get pissed. I pay my taxes, they don't, so I have every right to get upset and call them on their BS.
It's an awful nice economy you have there, it would be a shame if all these taxes made us layoff or move out of your state...
Little guys have no such clout, while the Intel's, Nike's, and Microsoft's can swing their weight around pretty readily. the result is that companies over a certain size effectively are able to become tax exempt for state and local purposes.
The argument is always that they employ enough people at high wages who pay plenty, which is a real cop out. Somehow I can't reconcile the behavior with the equal protection clause. Taxes need to be levied evenly and fairly, and letting important people and rich companies dodge these is really corrosive to society.
Sadly, not in my case. If not for those first 3-4 months I would probably have a second kid, but I really became an exhausted wreck until things got more regular and fell into a (mostly) once a night feeding schedule. Our coping mechanism at that point was that we traded nights to get up with him and I was only a zombie every other day at work instead of a constant zombie/a-hole.
The USA really needs to have much better maternity/paternity leave than we do. 2 weeks (burning through all my meager vacation) was not enough. My wife at least was able to get some cat-naps during the day, not so much for me (no, she didn't have it easier, but she did get more sleep from weeks 2-12). It is pretty darn hard to come home after working all day as a zombie and have to take over because your wife is an exhausted wreck, all knowing that the cycle won't have a break until the weekend.
Medical school hours and conditions looks like a giant hazing ritual. Plenty of science shows it is dumb and make all mortal humans more error prone. Somehow the medical profession thinks they are super-human (or must act as if they are) and put their patients in increased danger from fatigue and apparently illness as well.
Listening to an NPR piece on residency some months back sounded really pathetic. The pervasive attitude was that it made you a better doc, and since everyone else went through it then I have to too. Someone needs to get through that the emperor has no clothes and this is just stupid.
In the end my experience with docs is they are all pretty darn human, and all this hazing and stupid over-work ethic does nothing more than give them a false sense that they are not.
Icons are chosen that make no sense. Diskette for save, a gear for simulating an electrical circuit, etc.
So far the UI people I have encountered in the technical world are raging disasters, but they are VERY confident in their claims. My favorite was working for a test and measurement company where all the software bozos remote logged into the instruments to test their code. The instrument had a touch screen interface that was just about unusable as a result, but using a mouse was hobbled by the assumption that the cursor was as big as a human finger and would snap to things many pixels from your click.
The best user interfaces seem to be designed by people who are fed up with a tool and rewrite themselves. Innevitably if they are successful they get bought out and their efficient interfaces get "improved" by the committee. It reminds me of Animal Farm...
The sad thing is that what I generally see is that when poor user interfaces get updated these days it goes through some sort of committee of "experts" who design something even worse and more obfuscated. MS Word and Excel were poor before, but now they are just about unusable even after using them with the Ribbon for a few years.
Cramped, expensive, and heavily overhyped for years before being put on sale. Even though it is a solid car it was pretty well guaranteed to cause a yawn by time it actually became available.
Agreed. Infrastructure is probably a better place for government to be subsidizing than on the purchase side of things.
My Leaf is great as my beater commuter car, but for longer trips than 50 miles round trip we take my wife's car or my old truck if we need the space.
Other than Tesla, the charging infrastructure is an embarrassment. The Chaedemo standard (awful name) is neither fast enough for highway travel, nor can is be adequately relied on. Most installations are 1 or very rarely 2 fast chargers. Relying on these sets you up for spending about 1/3 of your long distance trip sitting at the charger (ignoring time spent exiting the highway, waiting for availability, etc). There are many different netowrks that all have cards or Fobs to gain access. The one around here is a fixed $20 per month with no easy ala carte option (you can call the 800 number and pay $7.50 per charge, which is a real hassle).
Pretty much I expect adoption to be slow as primary cars until we have Tesla like range and charging infrastructure at Leaf prices.
Whistle blowers are prosecuted vigorously and do not get the benefit of the doubt.
When dealing with a government entity you should probably do nothing, as the risks outweigh the rewards at this time. If you still feel like speaking up, raise the issue with your boss in one email, carefully and politely, and file a hard copy of the email somewhere safe. Do not go up the food chain, do not go to the press. If there is a crap storm the hard copy may save you, but even that is not assured.
The default position should be to protect yourself and your family, and not stick your neck out. We have too many examples that show that even the best intentions may result in the messenger being vigorously prosecuted.
Being able to listen to music with your car doors open is great, if not for the dang "your keys are in the ignition. So I spend a couple hours ripping open my dash to get to the stupid thing and rip the connector loose. It was a vast improvement in the utility of my truck.
Keep in mind that for widgets like phones and tablets that they are not always cycling fully on a daily basis. Lithium Ion batteries degrade much faster being deep cycled from 100% to near 0% than if you are only going 80% to 20%, like an order of magnitude longer. Most applications do not ever fuly charge the cells, and shut down before hitting zero to trade off a little capacity for vastly longer useful lifetimes.
The saddest part of the Volt was how heavily hyped it was. Even as a solid and not bad looking car, there was no way it could do anythig but disappoint after years and years of press releases, demoing mules, and teasing.
Use msconfig.exe to clean up some of the garbage running at startup. A lot of bloatware and crapware can sneak in over the years even if you are careful.
An SSD makes another world of difference, and they are not very expensive these days. A 500GB one is under $150 and should be plenty for most folks.
Scans should not run during the day unless your machine was off the night before. If your management lets your IT be this stupid, maybe look elsewhere for a better company. Seriously, if the company does not provide good enough tools and maintenance on them for you to effectively do your job you should polishing upmyour resume.
In this case the framers of the document are still all mostly around, it is not like trying to figure out the intent of an amendment or law that is 200 years old as it applies to technology that is only a few years old. Nobody during floor debate argued about this interpretation issue. It is purely an issue of ambiguous language and a shifting of power to the nutjob party that prevents even a typo to be corrected to clear this up to make the intent unambiguous.
Are you including the cost of a transmission replacement, or a new engine?
The 2011 and 2012's do have inferior batteries and deserve to be called out as lemons, but everything since is in-line to hold up for > 10 years and easily 150k miles.
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I really want an answer to the revenue question. It really is starting to feel like a free hit from a drug dealer. Sounds too good to be true, so what exactly is their long term plan for my computer?
My optimistic side does note that they currently get most of their revenue from new PC sales, and not from average Joe's upgrading OS's. So perhaps they are writing off the last ~10% of revenue to reduce the headache of XP and 7 users holding out when they try to cram a steaming pile of brand new MS UI's down our throat. Maybe now Metro will just show up as an update during the night and we'll have no option except to live with it.
I don't know why anyone with Windows 7 would want to jump on the "Free" download immediately. At a bare minimum you would think that waiting at least a few months for the dust to settle would be prudent. Just the fact that a nag message to opt-in came from an update should be enough to scare away anyone with half a wit.
Meant to say 10% per year, my bad.
Don't joke around, Hydrogen is very flammable!
Oxygen is a known oxidizer, so be sure to eat lots of antioxidant's when living or working around sources of oxygen.
All joking aside, Gallium-Arsenide as a compound is not all that dangerous. I wouldn't go eating it, but I have handled it many times and it does not require any special safety procedures. You already have GaAs parts inside of almost every cell phone. Virtually all output amplifiers to date are GaAs, with a minority of the low end phones using CMOS power amplifiers.
I am not sure why there is anything more on wasted on desktop processors given the last 6-7 years of only ~10 percent gains? We are expecting almost zero improvement in desktop performance with Skylake over the 4790K processors, and barely a power reduction. Billions were spent to get us almost nothing tangible.
Laptop machines have come a long way, but the desktop is stuck at 4 cores and no hint at anything but maybe 10% performance gains per year for the foreseeable future.
We are instead getting integrated crappy GPU's in flagship processors that will mostly never get utilized, and that crappy GPU is half the die area. I'd rather have the same die size with 6-8 cores, or more L2 cache, or almost anything else that I might actually make use of. Sadly, intel reserves those kinds of features for their much more expensive Xeon or "Extreme" branded lines.
It takes me 20 minutes to drive to work, 40 minutes to bike, and 55 minutes to take light rail. I have light rail stops just a 5 minute walk from both my house and from work, but there is a transfer between two different trains. So if it costs me an hour a day, I would rather spend an extra half hour with my kid morning and night than ride even a free light rail.
Biking gets me a workout that I desperately need, so I see that is time well spent for the days that I choose to ride.
That is cruel and unusual.
Day laborers are often off the books, and do not pay into social security or get any sort of protections in old age. More often than not hiring day laborers is illegal.
When I see lines like "...that would be better for businesses, consumers, and all those workers themselves." I get VERY skeptical. Rarely do we all win.
Uber has all the smell and feel of Wiley Coyote staying in air by running fast enough and not looking down. Drivers are not making good enough wages once you factor in depreciation and other costs. A whole bunch of the usual costs of doing business are being swept under the rug, such as benefits, unemployment protection, and social security payments. Of these part time drivers who come and go, it means someone else is footing those bills (like their main employer, or the worker when their car dies).
1099 contractors are already an abused definition, just as exempt is. Adding more categories is just going to make it easier for corporations to arbitrage people's desire to put food on the table.
When forced into it (new baby, long crunch times at work) I have found that it is not an acquired skill. After more than even a couple weeks of only getting about 6 hours I end up miserable, constantly groggy, slow to recover from exercise, and with impaired complex reasoning.
Back in college I lived in Alaska. Over summer I worked in a student lab with near constant daylight. I found that my happy spot was to work about 16-20 hours, then sleep for about 10-12. It was not uncommon to sleep for 7-8, get up to eat something, then go back to sleep for another 3-4. It is not that I was being lazy, I was in fact working 60-80 hours every week and loving it.
Companies of this size are able to write of a lot of their own legislation to legalize their desired behavior. Once the tail wags the dog like that you can no longer use the letter of the law to argue that big companies like MS are being responsible corporate citizens.
The argument that we should all just voluntarily pa extra taxes is a weak and sad one. There are no examples I am aware of of ANY government system that operated on voluntary taxes. The goal of a tax system should be to evenly and fairly levy taxes to pay for those things that are cannot or should not be done by the private sector (yes, there is a whole bee's nest of arguments we can get into in that sentence).
In the end I don't enjoy paying taxes, but I am happy to do so. I am happy to pay my fair share to do so as long as there is a general sense that all you other bozos who benefit from roads, defense, national parks, and so much more are also are paying roughly their fair share as well. When I see Intel and Nike in my town getting special tax breaks while the local schools are struggling I get pissed. I pay my taxes, they don't, so I have every right to get upset and call them on their BS.
It's an awful nice economy you have there, it would be a shame if all these taxes made us layoff or move out of your state...
Little guys have no such clout, while the Intel's, Nike's, and Microsoft's can swing their weight around pretty readily. the result is that companies over a certain size effectively are able to become tax exempt for state and local purposes.
The argument is always that they employ enough people at high wages who pay plenty, which is a real cop out. Somehow I can't reconcile the behavior with the equal protection clause. Taxes need to be levied evenly and fairly, and letting important people and rich companies dodge these is really corrosive to society.
Sadly, not in my case. If not for those first 3-4 months I would probably have a second kid, but I really became an exhausted wreck until things got more regular and fell into a (mostly) once a night feeding schedule. Our coping mechanism at that point was that we traded nights to get up with him and I was only a zombie every other day at work instead of a constant zombie/a-hole.
The USA really needs to have much better maternity/paternity leave than we do. 2 weeks (burning through all my meager vacation) was not enough. My wife at least was able to get some cat-naps during the day, not so much for me (no, she didn't have it easier, but she did get more sleep from weeks 2-12). It is pretty darn hard to come home after working all day as a zombie and have to take over because your wife is an exhausted wreck, all knowing that the cycle won't have a break until the weekend.
Medical school hours and conditions looks like a giant hazing ritual. Plenty of science shows it is dumb and make all mortal humans more error prone. Somehow the medical profession thinks they are super-human (or must act as if they are) and put their patients in increased danger from fatigue and apparently illness as well.
Listening to an NPR piece on residency some months back sounded really pathetic. The pervasive attitude was that it made you a better doc, and since everyone else went through it then I have to too. Someone needs to get through that the emperor has no clothes and this is just stupid.
In the end my experience with docs is they are all pretty darn human, and all this hazing and stupid over-work ethic does nothing more than give them a false sense that they are not.
UI people are pretty universally full of crap.
Icons are chosen that make no sense. Diskette for save, a gear for simulating an electrical circuit, etc.
So far the UI people I have encountered in the technical world are raging disasters, but they are VERY confident in their claims. My favorite was working for a test and measurement company where all the software bozos remote logged into the instruments to test their code. The instrument had a touch screen interface that was just about unusable as a result, but using a mouse was hobbled by the assumption that the cursor was as big as a human finger and would snap to things many pixels from your click.
The best user interfaces seem to be designed by people who are fed up with a tool and rewrite themselves. Innevitably if they are successful they get bought out and their efficient interfaces get "improved" by the committee. It reminds me of Animal Farm...
This.
Also, look at Cadence.
The sad thing is that what I generally see is that when poor user interfaces get updated these days it goes through some sort of committee of "experts" who design something even worse and more obfuscated. MS Word and Excel were poor before, but now they are just about unusable even after using them with the Ribbon for a few years.
Cramped, expensive, and heavily overhyped for years before being put on sale. Even though it is a solid car it was pretty well guaranteed to cause a yawn by time it actually became available.
Agreed. Infrastructure is probably a better place for government to be subsidizing than on the purchase side of things.
My Leaf is great as my beater commuter car, but for longer trips than 50 miles round trip we take my wife's car or my old truck if we need the space.
Other than Tesla, the charging infrastructure is an embarrassment. The Chaedemo standard (awful name) is neither fast enough for highway travel, nor can is be adequately relied on. Most installations are 1 or very rarely 2 fast chargers. Relying on these sets you up for spending about 1/3 of your long distance trip sitting at the charger (ignoring time spent exiting the highway, waiting for availability, etc). There are many different netowrks that all have cards or Fobs to gain access. The one around here is a fixed $20 per month with no easy ala carte option (you can call the 800 number and pay $7.50 per charge, which is a real hassle).
Pretty much I expect adoption to be slow as primary cars until we have Tesla like range and charging infrastructure at Leaf prices.
Whistle blowers are prosecuted vigorously and do not get the benefit of the doubt.
When dealing with a government entity you should probably do nothing, as the risks outweigh the rewards at this time. If you still feel like speaking up, raise the issue with your boss in one email, carefully and politely, and file a hard copy of the email somewhere safe. Do not go up the food chain, do not go to the press. If there is a crap storm the hard copy may save you, but even that is not assured.
The default position should be to protect yourself and your family, and not stick your neck out. We have too many examples that show that even the best intentions may result in the messenger being vigorously prosecuted.
Being able to listen to music with your car doors open is great, if not for the dang "your keys are in the ignition. So I spend a couple hours ripping open my dash to get to the stupid thing and rip the connector loose. It was a vast improvement in the utility of my truck.
Keep in mind that for widgets like phones and tablets that they are not always cycling fully on a daily basis. Lithium Ion batteries degrade much faster being deep cycled from 100% to near 0% than if you are only going 80% to 20%, like an order of magnitude longer. Most applications do not ever fuly charge the cells, and shut down before hitting zero to trade off a little capacity for vastly longer useful lifetimes.
If people only bought cars based on economics, the Ford Fiesta would be selling like hot cakes and SUV's would be a rare sight.
The saddest part of the Volt was how heavily hyped it was. Even as a solid and not bad looking car, there was no way it could do anythig but disappoint after years and years of press releases, demoing mules, and teasing.
The Bolt appears to be following the same path.
Use msconfig.exe to clean up some of the garbage running at startup. A lot of bloatware and crapware can sneak in over the years even if you are careful.
An SSD makes another world of difference, and they are not very expensive these days. A 500GB one is under $150 and should be plenty for most folks.
Scans should not run during the day unless your machine was off the night before. If your management lets your IT be this stupid, maybe look elsewhere for a better company. Seriously, if the company does not provide good enough tools and maintenance on them for you to effectively do your job you should polishing upmyour resume.
In this case the framers of the document are still all mostly around, it is not like trying to figure out the intent of an amendment or law that is 200 years old as it applies to technology that is only a few years old. Nobody during floor debate argued about this interpretation issue. It is purely an issue of ambiguous language and a shifting of power to the nutjob party that prevents even a typo to be corrected to clear this up to make the intent unambiguous.
Are you including the cost of a transmission replacement, or a new engine?
The 2011 and 2012's do have inferior batteries and deserve to be called out as lemons, but everything since is in-line to hold up for > 10 years and easily 150k miles.