I have seen many many organizations when I was consulting. Some were startups filled with people generally of a narrow age range (that of the founders) and old organizations where the bulk of the upper management were boomers. But nearly every organization that I worked with had the same thing happening. They were confronting a wave of technology that was changing everything. The boomers were having serious problems with this; at best they might latch onto a BlackBerry and think that they were leaping into the 21st century. A typical example though was the 20 something salesman who could make technology sing. The result was that he could outsell a 60 something by a significant multiple. The 20 something would pull over to a cafe and copy and paste his way to a great proposal that was sitting on the client's desk 40 minutes after they had met. He might return to the office with a marked up proposal and conclude the deal by the end of the week. The boomer on the otherhand would be lucky to have the proposal ready by the end of the week. So after a few rounds of this the boomer would start to get antsy about the 20 something; so he would play the "Seniority" card. Start trying to change the rules saying that the 20 something can't be flinging proposals all over the place without giving him time to "review" them.
I can give a specific example where a single fresh out of university salesman outsold the other 11 salesman combined. He had been put in a crap area where they thought his average sale would be around $10,000-$30,000. So they put him on a small base salary with a 30% commission. His average sale(he made many) was actually around $500,000 and they refused to pay out the commission. They said it wouldn't be fair to the other salesmen and that he would get the same 6% that they did. Oddly enough he took this for a few years but left in the end.
So what I have seen over and over is a pattern of boomers who seem to think that highly qualified 20 somethings are arrogant whereas their mistreatment of them is not. The beauty of this is that the qualified 20 somethings usually figure out that they are being mistreated and move into organizations filled with other non-boomers who want talent not arrogance.
But the most amusing situation is when the reverse happens. When a young company filled with young people accidentally hires a boomer. Often the boomer has left something like the telephone company or a Nortel and immediately sets to work trying to make the dynamic young company into a remake of their old stodgy company. One of the first symptoms is the previously unused words "Org-chart".
But I have seen a few examples of where young and old worked together extremely well. The typical situation was that you have a boomer who has zero interest in the day to day running of the company and all they care about is money. So they go out and raise the money from their fellow (well capitalized) boomers and let the young people do what ever the hell it is that they do.
But this last if very little different in perception but entirely different in outcome when you have a well capitalized boomer try to run a company of 20 somethings. The usual symptom here is that the boomer is completely incapable of learning the nuances of what is going on. So you have a technology company that should be releasing a new product every 2 months but instead is bogged down by the boomer grinding development to a halt while he deals with another boomer marketing company that will debate for months which shade of blue the background should be.
Now the above experience covers technology. In non technology companies this is where the boomers' capital trumps all. This would be the boomer coffee shop owner trying to be hip and cool, hiring a bunch of hipsters, paying them minimum wage, and driving to wine parties in his brand new leased BMW. No communication problems their, you kiss his ass you find another job.
In every boom there are con men who see piles of cash and people desperate to invest it. It has always annoyed me when these guys skip in from low-integrity industries like property development, come up with an idea that might even be impossible: "cluster smartphones into supercomputers for small business", round up millions of dollars, have the biggest booths at the local tech conferences, hire up a bunch of dillweeds, rent A+ locations, appear in dozens of self promoting articles "Top 40 under 40", drive around in $90,000 leased cars, and then flame out in a huge way. The only good thing is that when the bankruptcy people liquidate their stuff the stacks of unopened Aeron chairs and the Alienware computers go really cheap.
The massive downside is that they give a black eye to, or outbid, anyone with a valid product trying to raise money, hire developers, and rent locations.
I wonder if the developers promised that it was "basically impossible" to decompile the code. Or did the developers more honestly say, "this will buy us a bunch of time."
I don't think that I have ever met a person who, when away from the city lights, didn't marvel at the grand display overhead. I also don't think that I have ever met a person who upon re-entering a built up area ever said, "I'm glad those twinkling stars have finely gone away."
To be even more specific the darker it has been the more people have always marveled. When you can see our galaxy edge on in all its glory then the whole experience becomes just that much better.
But for some reason we don't fight the big box stores when they blast a megawatt or two into the completely unused corners of their lots. Or the car dealerships that seem to want to keep their cars warm with the lighting; not to mention the dealers that then use the skyward spotlights to announce that their salesmen are like the gods of Olympus.
Obviously some lighting is necessary but I would love to see some requirements for intelligent lighting. Lights that take into account that there is nobody needing their services and thus they can turn off. I suspect that at 2 in the morning all but the most populated areas would be quite dark. Plus the added bonus of reduced energy costs.
A simple to detect symptom of this is the relentless self promotion that many of these people do. If you look at many of the CEOs that have been given the heave ho; most were becoming household names. A great example of this is the "Curse of Forbes" which basically states that if you make it onto the cover of Forbes magazine that you or your company is going to be in huge trouble in the not too distant future.
But there are many awesome CEOs who are not a household name and avoid publicity as a waste of time. They focus their energies on running their companies. Whereas the people who relentlessly self promote have to do two seriously broken things. One is to neglect what they are supposed to be doing, and the second is that they often have to take credit for others' work. Technically there is a third quasi-valid reason to self promote and that is your products suck and you try to sell them through pure con-artistry.
Even years ago I knew a bunch of pilots in training. Oddly enough it is difficult to tell a great pilot; it is only easy to detect the bad ones through their misfortunes. Thus being a blow-hard was a fairly effective method to having people hire you. Most of the better blowhards had shocking levels of success as compared to the more diligent pilots who just focused on their training and hours.
Where these blowhards succeed is that they are quite capable of launching their careers far beyond what a critical look at their skills and experience would normally justify. Then reality will kick in as they start to make a mess of things. At that point the "Peter Pinnacle" definitely kicks in.
So where I would say the Peter Principle and the Peter Pinnacle differ is that under the Peter Principle people get promoted (typically one level above competence) until they fail. Whereas under the Peter Pinnacle people get promoted until they run out of hot air (which could be dozens of levels beyond competence).
The worst part is that people who will reach the highest heights of the Peter Pinnacle were probably terrible from day one and realized that bluster, scheming, and politicking were the only ways they would survive at any level. Programmers who couldn't program, then couldn't manage, then couldn't run a department, then couldn't run a company. But at each level they made sure that things were structured so that they could take credit for successes that were about to happen, and make sure others were put in place to take the blame for their messes. "I'm glad that I took over from Bob when I did. I was able to turn defeat into victory." and six months later "I left that department a well oiled machine, I misplaced my trust in Sue to be able to step into my shoes."
Mobile was 100% obviously the future 10 or more years ago. If Microsoft had any idea what was going on it would have relentlessly pursued mobile for the last 10 years. Yet everything they did was always a bit off. Windows CE and friends were bizarre experiments on how to annoy developers. Things like Vista were just symptoms of a company that didn't seem to understand that to thrive they need to win hearts and minds, not just strong arm people into complacency. Take MS Office. Most people would be completely happy with office 2000 or maybe something older. Most people would be happy if XP were to have just been kept up to date. I am not saying Windows 8 is bad so much as for most people just don't care. Even things like the Metro interface could just be larded onto XP if that were something desired.
Just about the only MS thing that I have wanted in years was an XBox. That is pretty poor output for the last decade. But if we go back in time MS did put out useful products one after another. Windows 95 was a huge leap, 98 another, NT 2000 was fantastic, and XP after a service pack or two was solid. But then it sort of went wrong..Net had so much potential, Vista was a hot mess. The new Windows servers along with MSSQL had such complicated licensing that Linux was the only way for me.
Now just about the only MS products that I use (until I can find a secure replacement) are Skype and my XBox 360. Even the XBox One isn't catching my attention. I feel pity for anyone with a MS phone and when I hear people using MS servers I just wonder what has kept them away from Linux.
So quite simply prior to Balmer MS was doing some interesting things. But during the entire time Balmer is there they have done almost nothing interesting. Boring has continued to make them bags of cash because so many companies out there were unable or not interested in switching. So where Balmer has been shockingly lucky is that there has been no real competitor to MS Office. Google docs has been making some inroads, and some people compromise with the various OpenOffice products but the simple reality is that once you get complicated with your documents these other product begin to show their incompatibilities. In a business environment it is just not worth futzing with the software when the MS product can be so readily purchased. But my long standing theory is that if someone comes out with a solid word processor/spreadsheet then MS is then going to begin to die.
The one that I had hopes for was Apple's iWorks product but that seemed to have been abandoned 4 years ago plus they never ported it to other platforms. Now if they opensourced iWorks for the world to build on then something exciting might happen.
So my prediction on MS's future is based upon Balmer's replacement's relationship with the Office Division. If the replacement comes from the Office division then MS is dead. But if the replacement recognizes that office is a cash cow but that the company can't rely upon it for ever then there is some hope. If the replacement comes from their R&D division it will probably be exciting even if completely crazy.
Hello Jaro chain, do you know what I prize even more than a bedbug free hotel? My right to free speech. I wouldn't be mad if this suit was about some guy faking the bedbugs but now you have escalated it to an attack on a fundamental human right. So any time I am forced to stay in Quebec city I will make sure to avoid any of your 6 anti-free-speech zones.
Most people are consumers not producers. I read some statistics on reddit users (which I suspect apply to slashdot users) that a shockingly low number of reddit users vote, very few comment, and almost none post. All this with nearly 50% being registered users.
So I can't see it being any different with 3D in that I could see a 3D forum where a tiny number post original objects, a few more have constructive comments (i.e. make the bearings 20% bigger so they don't fail so fast) and some voting that they like the object. But as I said, the revolution will take place in two waves. The first is when 3D printers are common in the business world such as car repair places printing replacement parts. And then the final revolution when whole products(a whole vacuum cleaner) are printed on demand somewhere local to the consumer (potentially in their home but probably at first in some specialty place).
Laser sintering is used to make 3D metal things that are fantastically durable. All these people have been blah blahing about plastic guns when the metal ones are right around the corner.
At first I can see 3D printing being limited to fairly small objects; thus you could print all kinds of parts for a car but not the whole car. Also at first there are many parts that I suspect just won't lend themselves to 3D printing such as the finer electronics, the windows, etc. I can't see why you couldn't scale up 3D metal printing to car frame sizes. Also if you take a car apart into that which is 3D printable and that which isn't the isn't pile should be quite small. So you don't reduce imports to zero just to a small fraction of what they were. The same with many other household objects such as taps, pipes, knives, hand tools. There are some objects that in their entirety might remain resistant such as iPhones but I suspect that even some electronics will become largely 3D printable (TV remotes).
Good point. What I foresee is a greater level of recycling; You toss the old things into a grinder and make new things from them. The other bit is that the Samoas will be more inclined to want the raw material directly, thus cutting out the country that previously turned those raw materials into higher valued goods.
I don't think people realize the economic Tsunami that personal 3D printing technology is going to be. Right now it is equivalent to the point in a tsunami where the ocean goes out and the people run around picking up fish and marveling at the other bobbles exposed. Then the water rushes in and everything changes in a flash.
At first 3D printing is going to be a novelty where we geeks will bounce up and down in our seats every time we hit the print button. Building showerheads and whatnot for all our families.
To give a simple example of how this will end up looking when 3D manufacturing is mature take the case of Samoa. This tiny island country is damn isolated. Basically the way they earn foreign currency is coconut exports (not very efficient due to the distance), foreign aid, remittances from family abroad, tourism, and oddly enough wiring harnesses. This means that for every car part that is needed (including the whole car) Samoa has to export the equivalent value in coconuts and whatnot. Needless to say in order to live a modern life in Samoa they need to produce a huge amount which is hard when you are producing low value goods and desiring high value ones. Compare this to Germany which produces a huge surplus of very high value goods and thus has little problem importing the cheaper things (like coconuts) that they desire. But what happens when Samoa can fully produce all but the most advanced goods such as micro processors. This would massively reduce the imports of many many high value goods while not reducing the world's demand for their coconuts.
Somoa is a simple example but there are many countries around the world that are presently producing little the rest of the world wants and others that produce too much. Greece would be an example. Many African countries would also be in this situation.
This is where the economic Tsunami will end up. Countries that produce the raw materials that are required by others will either be fine or thrive. While countries that have traditionally produced high value goods but have few resources are going to find that they have a major change coming.
So in the end there will be two groups who do well. Those who produce extreme high value items such as CPUs, Touch screens, etc. And those who produce commodities that the rest of the world wants.
This is going to result in a tsunami of money moving to and from places that aren't the traditional norms.
There is a great documentary: Seisen! The Rise and Fall Of The Japanese Empire. Does a nice overview. I always thought that OK Pearl Harbour was sort of dumb, why did they do that. But looking at the trajectory of their behavior you sort of realize that sort of dumb was the inevitable direction they had locked themselves into over the previous decades.
Maybe that is the real measure of greatness. If I had won a Nobel prize in physics, in every argument I wouldn't ask, "How many Nobels have you won, again?" And I wouldn't get a T-Shirt saying, "Nobel prize winner here, make way." But if I(as I really am sans-Nobel) were in a room full of Nobel prize winners I would have trouble restraining myself from trying not to show off the two grains of knowledge I do have; just so I wouldn't feel stupid.
People often bring up Hitler and the Nazis in their arguments; but I have an much more interesting one. The Japanese; they were not destined to the craziness of WWII. They actually started out by aggressively building their economy and along with it their military. But they wanted to be respected by the western powers and sit at the big boy's table. But then their military industrial complex began pushing harder and harder for more aggressive excursions into the rest of Asia. Most of Asia, including China, was weak compared to Japan so they made for easy targets. So the harder the military industrial complex pushed the more success they had and resources available for the taking.
But this behavior was not really in sync with the Japanese people's desires. They didn't want their sons off fighting/dying in wonky places. They didn't want huge numbers of other people killed for their coal. So the hawks in the government and industry did their damnedest to quell any descent. People were hauled in for questioning and generally bad things happened to people who spoke out. So people quickly learned that to go along with the madness was the safest route. Thus there was no questioning of the propaganda so people could even ignore the terrible direction their country was heading.
Now we have the exact same thing happening in the western world. Grocklaw is being shut down? Make a list of the evil companies in the US and see how many of those have been shut down? None? Grocklaw is one of the few organizations that is working against the madness.
Then look at the two countries that Snowden and Assange fled to. It is madness that these are places of refuge. Even my Canada is going bonkers. I am so proud that we were where the draft dodgers came yet we recently sent a guy back to the US who effectively was a draft dodger. If Canadians had been able to vote on his stay there would have been a resounding yes. But our government is buying into this madness lock stock and barrel.
But what is the answer? Prior to WWII many Germans could see what was coming so they fled Europe. Wasn't easy but for many it saved their lives. But right now nearly every country in the world is either playing with the US; often in secret.
So again, an interesting table could be made of all the world's countries levels of Rah rah and self aggrandizement; and then compare it to a table of the least happy and free countries.
Their thinking probably goes along the lines of: each admin has a0.00003% of ratting them out each year and with a zillion admins they are looking at an 8% per year chance of a whistle blow. (Numbers came out of my ass) So if you can reduce the number of potential whistle blowers to 10% you massively reduce the chances of a whistle blow to less than one per career.
But if you have fewer admins each will have to not only have greater power due to the larger surface area but due to the whole hit by the bus thing the overlap will have to be greater. So you now have a bunch of guys with a bigger picture and better access. In that case I should invest in portable media companies as these guys are going to be running in and out with truckloads of data.
What all these agencies really need to do is to reevaluate what they are doing. This way the Snowdens still working for them will say; oh look we just used boring legal means to arrest run of the mill terrorists. Nothing to leak there.
But instead these various agencies are more concerned about covering their own asses. If I were a betting man I would guess their are more resources now deployed to catch Snowden and anyone working with him than probably the top 10 genuine terrorists put together. Not to mention the damage that they are doing to their own country. Every right they trample in their attempt to catch him just adds another exclamation point to his leaks. So services like AWS aren't going to collapse tomorrow but right now there are people all over the world looking to get their data out of the US and there are companies all over the world slowly ramping up to accept their business. You don't move your servers overnight and you don't set up data centers over night. But I suspect that you will see a slight change in the growth graph and that change is permanent.
The other key damage is even more subtle. If you are running a company such as Siemens would you probably had suspicions that China would be after your data to give to their companies. But now you might be thinking whoa is the US pulling this crap too? Now you are going to be reticent about any of your best stuff going to the US. You are going to rethink research grants to US universities. Again not overnight but all things being equal world relations with the US just chilled a few degrees.
As far as I'm concerned it is the bloated piled of McAfee that costs piles of money in lost productivity not to mention the number of embedded systems where the "Your subscription is running out" crap pops up on some jumbotron.
Trialware installs of McAfee and Norton AV are the number one reason I long ago told people to stop buying PCs with Windows on them. I don't really mind windows but I got sick of every relative begging for my help to remove all the bloatware for AV, music services, game services, etc that came with their "blank" machines. My windows buddies all say that the Microsoft AV tool is great (and free) so Dell, HP, Toshiba, etc aren't providing a service when they "offer" any of this bloatware.
I don't even like "removing" it as I don't feel that the result is a clean install. There are usually scars and grime left behind.
Often these situations can somewhat over promise but when it comes to breaking the power companies I keep my fingers crossed. But the key here is that the economics can be quite subtle. A simple example would be if this system were to provide power at an overall cost of $0.11/kwh; which is roughly what many people pay. (My point being based on a price that is roughly your present rate) So you would doubt that many people would switch. But there are many people out there who genuinely hate the power company. Lets say 3% who do. So these 3% make the cost neutral switch. No biggie except that the power company just lost 3% of their residential customers who previously (at least in my area) had no where else to turn. Still 3% isn't much. But the power company didn't lose 3% of their costs as many of their costs are fixed. So income is actually down a tad more than 3%. So this causes the power company to raise rates a bit to compensate; thus losing a few more customers. Raising rates a tad again. But the growing power rates are now making home power generation more and more attractive. At even a fairly low total loss of customers, say 10%, the power company could potentially cross a threshold where their fixed costs have remained high enough and their revenues dropped by enough that they become profitless.
In all likelihood the power company will begin insane lobbying efforts to force people to remain customers. People won't put up with that so those efforts will eventually fail. I can see a situation in some areas where the power company is government owned that the government will either outlaw or severely tax home power generation.
Now there are two other considerations which complicate the situation. The fuel cell will create much waste heat. In a hot crowded location it actually might be in the public interest to keep power generation outside of the urban heat islands.
The other consideration is that increasing home power generation may very well increase demands on things like natural gas which could result in price increases. But my guess is that much of this would be offset by the matching reductions in natural gas usage by your local power monopoly. (If it generation is done with that fuel)
My argument holds even if the home generation rates are a tiny bit higher than power company rates. But my argument isn't even needed if the home generation rates are significantly lower. Then I will laugh for the entire 5 minutes the power company tries to claim that it will survive this new technology.
So in my neighbourhood I suspect a wonderful collapse of the local power company due to the heat mostly being desired(cold winters). The power company being reviled. The natural gas prices being OK. And the fact that the local anti-fracking government is about to experience a "Throw the bums out" moment. Plus the fact that our reviled power company is doing a strange deal that some think will send our power rates soaring.
I have a few friends who worked for the bigger companies and their experiences were pretty uniformly miserable. One worked directly for a big company and even though he could make opengl dance they had him working on what was basically build scripting. The others worked for game companies that did the porting of the larger games to the lower tier platforms such as the DS. These companies put a huge amount of effort into glamour (highly photogenic workspaces) but were just thankless sweatshops with the few owners being the only ones making any money.
That said, their resumes now have a golden game programming glow. So they have been able to go out into the indy/startup world and be treated like kings. Way way better than some third rate "game programming" degree or diploma program.
This is an excellent point. If you had truly random data and then xored it with 123412341234 the crappy 1234 would add very little to the cryptographic strength but it wouldn't take away from the uber random layer. Ideally you would use layer upon layer of randomness. Seeing that you don't need to generate it in realtime you would have the luxury of just piling on many very different types of randomness. This way even if it turns out that say the lava lamp has a mathematical weakness along with the rain having one you just keep adding new layers. Ideally you are using things that are so random (radioactive decay) that if anyone figures out a way to predict it they win a Nobel prize. I think predicting radioactive decay is the Nobel equivalent of a Scratch and win.
You should take a class in professional communication. You have some serious problems writing coherently.
I apologize. My excuse is that I often read/write slashdot after working a 16 hour day. My other failing is that I will hit submit and then read what I wrote as opposed to checking during the preview. This results in my realizing that I just said something like that I work a 160 hour day or a 1 hour day. My best posts are when I write 300 words and then cut it down to 80. My worst are when I leave it at 300.
And I am not being sarcastic when I ask if you could suggest the fastest quality online course in communications (I don't have a whole lot of time to spare).
Coffee has been shown to help in many diseases and increase longevity but seeing that caffeine is addictive I suspect that people with addictive personality problems will be the ones that drink way way too much. People with that problem no doubt indulge in all kinds of behaviors that put them in the grave earlier than is normal.
Assuming that even if the study were to eliminate those with other terrible addictions such as cocaine the people that I have met who drank too much coffee also tended to be serial daters, drove too fast, drank too much pop, gambled, drank too much during social settings (even if they weren't alcoholics) and generally led lives that were a mess. I'm not sure that eliminating coffee would have added a day to their lives.
If you have 11 guys bidding on your 10 camels then you will get a great price. If 2 of the guys buy cars so you now have 9 guys bidding for your 10 camels then you are going to get hosed. This is the same situation combined with the fact that people are angry at being abused for a long time. Being forced to pay outrageous prices for crappy programming. Then spreading out the desired channels in to 4 different packages so that we have to buy all 4 to get the 5 channels that we only wanted. Plus commercials that drive us up the wall. Moving programs around based on this weeks insider political clout of the producer. Then cancelling shows when the political clout of the producer dropped below some imaginary threshold.
Then you get the ultimate competitor, piracy. Piracy set the bar as to what the consumer can have. Basically commercial free, on demand, and with no bizarre strings such as time-limits, device limits, or weirdo delays for countries that aren't the US. All this plus it was almost free. The two gate charges were that you had to mess with torrents, and you once in a while get a dud. But Netflix showed that there is a business model that can compete with piracy. Month after month they get money from people who are now getting nearly all the benefits of piracy with none of the downsides.
Is Netflix the be all and end all? Probably not. One great quote I heard went like this, "Will Netflix become more like HBO faster than HBO will become like Netflix."
There are exceptions. Nightly news. Live sports. And highly topical TV such as Big Brother. Those don't quite fit the download netflix model.
Now where this whole thing breaks down is that I suspect that the big producers are all going to think, "Hey we can build out our own netflix with our giant library." They are wrong. If you open up your overpriced hotdog stand next to McDonald's that just went all-you-can-eat you will do 1/1000th of the business. These other companies have little hope of becoming even Pepsi to Netflix's Coke. People aren't going to drop cable to discover the wonders of Netflix at under $10 month only to start tagging on Disney, Warner, Sony, etc bringing them back up to their old obscene cable TV bill. Maybe people will subscribe to 2 services but with their all-you-can-eat libraries growing and getting better why would you need 3+ services?
The one I can't figure out is iTunes. Why would anyone buy anything that you can get on Netflix for the price of many months of Netflix? The prices on iTunes are bonkers.
I recently took a course on Cryptography and the guy basically showed that with system after system that if he could pick just the tiniest thread loose he just tossed the algorithm into the junk heap. One of the other mantras was don't roll your own; you don't have enough Phds. But when it came to things like AES he seemed pretty confident. At the time of the course I nodded my head and wasn't thinking paranoid thoughts. But if we have learned anything this last month it is that you can take your typical person you once dismissed as paranoid and multiply their ravings by 3.
So my paranoid raving #1 is that they can break any of the common encryption schemes. Some mathematicians might say pshaw but hey this is now a post Snowden world. If commonly accepted encryption isn't broken then yay!
But for those with real good data such as bankers who don't want the NSA handing the data over to Goldman Sachs (why not as they make for great conspiracy fodder) then I would only use one time pad encryption. Good luck finding a mathematically loose thread there. A simple way to do one time pad encryption is just like the old spies. You send say 5 people over to your destination each with a different 1TB memory chip containing truly random data. (radioactive decay, xored with rain xored with a lava lamp) Then when you transmit data you xor it through all 5 layers of random data.
But as for the article if I were in Europe I would move my servers to Europe tomorrow. These government goons all think alike so I suspect that even the Euro police will cooperate anyway; they'll just deny it in a different accent. For instance, I sit in Canada and don't believe for one second that the local police wouldn't pee themselves with delight if the us Feds asked them to do something.
So the giant rethink in many security setups will have to be EVERYTHING that I don't control is completely compromised. Even individual employees could be compromised. Thus I would only use data schemes that would require the blackmailing/threatening/screwing of many employees.
But the simple reality is that this requires everyone to become a Rosa Parks. Every employee at these big companies needs to step out and spill the entire truth. If one person comes out they are Snowden II. If 100 come out the party is over.
Ink jet reservoir refillable cartridges are great. (No this isn't my ebay auction) I have linked to one for a canon printer but you can get them for many other printer models. Basically these things allow you to put 120ml of ink into each colour reservoir; whereas a standard cartridge capacity is in the range of 12-20ml. So you can print and print without worrying about having to mess with the messy cartridges. Also the reservoirs are external to the printer so you can see how much ink is remaining at a glance.
I am going to guess that inkjet printers will use far less power in both standby and printing. Plus inkjet printers are cheaper and generally smaller/lighter for shipping.
Printers can be tricky about non-standard printer cartridges so before jumping in with refillable carts do a single printer test to make sure there is no complaining.
One theoretical limitation with inkjets is that they are not truly meant for heavy duty office use. I have seen them perform fine under heavy load but seeing that the ink is worth more than the printers having spare cheap printers where you can just swap in the old ink reservoirs would be a good idea.
Personally I just buy used printers and throw in refillables from day one. These can be had for cheap from people who found out the price of store bought refills.
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I have seen many many organizations when I was consulting. Some were startups filled with people generally of a narrow age range (that of the founders) and old organizations where the bulk of the upper management were boomers. But nearly every organization that I worked with had the same thing happening. They were confronting a wave of technology that was changing everything. The boomers were having serious problems with this; at best they might latch onto a BlackBerry and think that they were leaping into the 21st century. A typical example though was the 20 something salesman who could make technology sing. The result was that he could outsell a 60 something by a significant multiple. The 20 something would pull over to a cafe and copy and paste his way to a great proposal that was sitting on the client's desk 40 minutes after they had met. He might return to the office with a marked up proposal and conclude the deal by the end of the week. The boomer on the otherhand would be lucky to have the proposal ready by the end of the week. So after a few rounds of this the boomer would start to get antsy about the 20 something; so he would play the "Seniority" card. Start trying to change the rules saying that the 20 something can't be flinging proposals all over the place without giving him time to "review" them.
I can give a specific example where a single fresh out of university salesman outsold the other 11 salesman combined. He had been put in a crap area where they thought his average sale would be around $10,000-$30,000. So they put him on a small base salary with a 30% commission. His average sale(he made many) was actually around $500,000 and they refused to pay out the commission. They said it wouldn't be fair to the other salesmen and that he would get the same 6% that they did. Oddly enough he took this for a few years but left in the end.
So what I have seen over and over is a pattern of boomers who seem to think that highly qualified 20 somethings are arrogant whereas their mistreatment of them is not. The beauty of this is that the qualified 20 somethings usually figure out that they are being mistreated and move into organizations filled with other non-boomers who want talent not arrogance.
But the most amusing situation is when the reverse happens. When a young company filled with young people accidentally hires a boomer. Often the boomer has left something like the telephone company or a Nortel and immediately sets to work trying to make the dynamic young company into a remake of their old stodgy company. One of the first symptoms is the previously unused words "Org-chart".
But I have seen a few examples of where young and old worked together extremely well. The typical situation was that you have a boomer who has zero interest in the day to day running of the company and all they care about is money. So they go out and raise the money from their fellow (well capitalized) boomers and let the young people do what ever the hell it is that they do.
But this last if very little different in perception but entirely different in outcome when you have a well capitalized boomer try to run a company of 20 somethings. The usual symptom here is that the boomer is completely incapable of learning the nuances of what is going on. So you have a technology company that should be releasing a new product every 2 months but instead is bogged down by the boomer grinding development to a halt while he deals with another boomer marketing company that will debate for months which shade of blue the background should be.
Now the above experience covers technology. In non technology companies this is where the boomers' capital trumps all. This would be the boomer coffee shop owner trying to be hip and cool, hiring a bunch of hipsters, paying them minimum wage, and driving to wine parties in his brand new leased BMW. No communication problems their, you kiss his ass you find another job.
I wonder how many HTML/Javascript developers have been instructed to make it "impossible" to steal the site's forward facing code?
"OK I'll use the META tag IMPOSSIBLE=true."
In every boom there are con men who see piles of cash and people desperate to invest it. It has always annoyed me when these guys skip in from low-integrity industries like property development, come up with an idea that might even be impossible: "cluster smartphones into supercomputers for small business", round up millions of dollars, have the biggest booths at the local tech conferences, hire up a bunch of dillweeds, rent A+ locations, appear in dozens of self promoting articles "Top 40 under 40", drive around in $90,000 leased cars, and then flame out in a huge way. The only good thing is that when the bankruptcy people liquidate their stuff the stacks of unopened Aeron chairs and the Alienware computers go really cheap.
The massive downside is that they give a black eye to, or outbid, anyone with a valid product trying to raise money, hire developers, and rent locations.
I wonder if the developers promised that it was "basically impossible" to decompile the code. Or did the developers more honestly say, "this will buy us a bunch of time."
I don't think that I have ever met a person who, when away from the city lights, didn't marvel at the grand display overhead. I also don't think that I have ever met a person who upon re-entering a built up area ever said, "I'm glad those twinkling stars have finely gone away."
To be even more specific the darker it has been the more people have always marveled. When you can see our galaxy edge on in all its glory then the whole experience becomes just that much better.
But for some reason we don't fight the big box stores when they blast a megawatt or two into the completely unused corners of their lots. Or the car dealerships that seem to want to keep their cars warm with the lighting; not to mention the dealers that then use the skyward spotlights to announce that their salesmen are like the gods of Olympus.
Obviously some lighting is necessary but I would love to see some requirements for intelligent lighting. Lights that take into account that there is nobody needing their services and thus they can turn off. I suspect that at 2 in the morning all but the most populated areas would be quite dark. Plus the added bonus of reduced energy costs.
A simple to detect symptom of this is the relentless self promotion that many of these people do. If you look at many of the CEOs that have been given the heave ho; most were becoming household names. A great example of this is the "Curse of Forbes" which basically states that if you make it onto the cover of Forbes magazine that you or your company is going to be in huge trouble in the not too distant future.
But there are many awesome CEOs who are not a household name and avoid publicity as a waste of time. They focus their energies on running their companies. Whereas the people who relentlessly self promote have to do two seriously broken things. One is to neglect what they are supposed to be doing, and the second is that they often have to take credit for others' work. Technically there is a third quasi-valid reason to self promote and that is your products suck and you try to sell them through pure con-artistry.
Even years ago I knew a bunch of pilots in training. Oddly enough it is difficult to tell a great pilot; it is only easy to detect the bad ones through their misfortunes. Thus being a blow-hard was a fairly effective method to having people hire you. Most of the better blowhards had shocking levels of success as compared to the more diligent pilots who just focused on their training and hours.
Where these blowhards succeed is that they are quite capable of launching their careers far beyond what a critical look at their skills and experience would normally justify. Then reality will kick in as they start to make a mess of things. At that point the "Peter Pinnacle" definitely kicks in.
So where I would say the Peter Principle and the Peter Pinnacle differ is that under the Peter Principle people get promoted (typically one level above competence) until they fail. Whereas under the Peter Pinnacle people get promoted until they run out of hot air (which could be dozens of levels beyond competence).
The worst part is that people who will reach the highest heights of the Peter Pinnacle were probably terrible from day one and realized that bluster, scheming, and politicking were the only ways they would survive at any level. Programmers who couldn't program, then couldn't manage, then couldn't run a department, then couldn't run a company. But at each level they made sure that things were structured so that they could take credit for successes that were about to happen, and make sure others were put in place to take the blame for their messes. "I'm glad that I took over from Bob when I did. I was able to turn defeat into victory." and six months later "I left that department a well oiled machine, I misplaced my trust in Sue to be able to step into my shoes."
Mobile was 100% obviously the future 10 or more years ago. If Microsoft had any idea what was going on it would have relentlessly pursued mobile for the last 10 years. Yet everything they did was always a bit off. Windows CE and friends were bizarre experiments on how to annoy developers. Things like Vista were just symptoms of a company that didn't seem to understand that to thrive they need to win hearts and minds, not just strong arm people into complacency. Take MS Office. Most people would be completely happy with office 2000 or maybe something older. Most people would be happy if XP were to have just been kept up to date. I am not saying Windows 8 is bad so much as for most people just don't care. Even things like the Metro interface could just be larded onto XP if that were something desired.
.Net had so much potential, Vista was a hot mess. The new Windows servers along with MSSQL had such complicated licensing that Linux was the only way for me.
Just about the only MS thing that I have wanted in years was an XBox. That is pretty poor output for the last decade. But if we go back in time MS did put out useful products one after another. Windows 95 was a huge leap, 98 another, NT 2000 was fantastic, and XP after a service pack or two was solid. But then it sort of went wrong.
Now just about the only MS products that I use (until I can find a secure replacement) are Skype and my XBox 360. Even the XBox One isn't catching my attention. I feel pity for anyone with a MS phone and when I hear people using MS servers I just wonder what has kept them away from Linux.
So quite simply prior to Balmer MS was doing some interesting things. But during the entire time Balmer is there they have done almost nothing interesting. Boring has continued to make them bags of cash because so many companies out there were unable or not interested in switching. So where Balmer has been shockingly lucky is that there has been no real competitor to MS Office. Google docs has been making some inroads, and some people compromise with the various OpenOffice products but the simple reality is that once you get complicated with your documents these other product begin to show their incompatibilities. In a business environment it is just not worth futzing with the software when the MS product can be so readily purchased. But my long standing theory is that if someone comes out with a solid word processor/spreadsheet then MS is then going to begin to die.
The one that I had hopes for was Apple's iWorks product but that seemed to have been abandoned 4 years ago plus they never ported it to other platforms. Now if they opensourced iWorks for the world to build on then something exciting might happen.
So my prediction on MS's future is based upon Balmer's replacement's relationship with the Office Division. If the replacement comes from the Office division then MS is dead. But if the replacement recognizes that office is a cash cow but that the company can't rely upon it for ever then there is some hope. If the replacement comes from their R&D division it will probably be exciting even if completely crazy.
Hello Jaro chain, do you know what I prize even more than a bedbug free hotel? My right to free speech. I wouldn't be mad if this suit was about some guy faking the bedbugs but now you have escalated it to an attack on a fundamental human right. So any time I am forced to stay in Quebec city I will make sure to avoid any of your 6 anti-free-speech zones.
Most people are consumers not producers. I read some statistics on reddit users (which I suspect apply to slashdot users) that a shockingly low number of reddit users vote, very few comment, and almost none post. All this with nearly 50% being registered users.
So I can't see it being any different with 3D in that I could see a 3D forum where a tiny number post original objects, a few more have constructive comments (i.e. make the bearings 20% bigger so they don't fail so fast) and some voting that they like the object. But as I said, the revolution will take place in two waves. The first is when 3D printers are common in the business world such as car repair places printing replacement parts. And then the final revolution when whole products(a whole vacuum cleaner) are printed on demand somewhere local to the consumer (potentially in their home but probably at first in some specialty place).
Laser sintering is used to make 3D metal things that are fantastically durable. All these people have been blah blahing about plastic guns when the metal ones are right around the corner.
At first I can see 3D printing being limited to fairly small objects; thus you could print all kinds of parts for a car but not the whole car. Also at first there are many parts that I suspect just won't lend themselves to 3D printing such as the finer electronics, the windows, etc. I can't see why you couldn't scale up 3D metal printing to car frame sizes. Also if you take a car apart into that which is 3D printable and that which isn't the isn't pile should be quite small. So you don't reduce imports to zero just to a small fraction of what they were. The same with many other household objects such as taps, pipes, knives, hand tools. There are some objects that in their entirety might remain resistant such as iPhones but I suspect that even some electronics will become largely 3D printable (TV remotes).
Good point. What I foresee is a greater level of recycling; You toss the old things into a grinder and make new things from them. The other bit is that the Samoas will be more inclined to want the raw material directly, thus cutting out the country that previously turned those raw materials into higher valued goods.
I don't think people realize the economic Tsunami that personal 3D printing technology is going to be. Right now it is equivalent to the point in a tsunami where the ocean goes out and the people run around picking up fish and marveling at the other bobbles exposed. Then the water rushes in and everything changes in a flash.
At first 3D printing is going to be a novelty where we geeks will bounce up and down in our seats every time we hit the print button. Building showerheads and whatnot for all our families.
To give a simple example of how this will end up looking when 3D manufacturing is mature take the case of Samoa. This tiny island country is damn isolated. Basically the way they earn foreign currency is coconut exports (not very efficient due to the distance), foreign aid, remittances from family abroad, tourism, and oddly enough wiring harnesses. This means that for every car part that is needed (including the whole car) Samoa has to export the equivalent value in coconuts and whatnot. Needless to say in order to live a modern life in Samoa they need to produce a huge amount which is hard when you are producing low value goods and desiring high value ones. Compare this to Germany which produces a huge surplus of very high value goods and thus has little problem importing the cheaper things (like coconuts) that they desire. But what happens when Samoa can fully produce all but the most advanced goods such as micro processors. This would massively reduce the imports of many many high value goods while not reducing the world's demand for their coconuts.
Somoa is a simple example but there are many countries around the world that are presently producing little the rest of the world wants and others that produce too much. Greece would be an example. Many African countries would also be in this situation.
This is where the economic Tsunami will end up. Countries that produce the raw materials that are required by others will either be fine or thrive. While countries that have traditionally produced high value goods but have few resources are going to find that they have a major change coming.
So in the end there will be two groups who do well. Those who produce extreme high value items such as CPUs, Touch screens, etc. And those who produce commodities that the rest of the world wants.
This is going to result in a tsunami of money moving to and from places that aren't the traditional norms.
There is a great documentary: Seisen! The Rise and Fall Of The Japanese Empire. Does a nice overview. I always thought that OK Pearl Harbour was sort of dumb, why did they do that. But looking at the trajectory of their behavior you sort of realize that sort of dumb was the inevitable direction they had locked themselves into over the previous decades.
Maybe that is the real measure of greatness. If I had won a Nobel prize in physics, in every argument I wouldn't ask, "How many Nobels have you won, again?" And I wouldn't get a T-Shirt saying, "Nobel prize winner here, make way." But if I(as I really am sans-Nobel) were in a room full of Nobel prize winners I would have trouble restraining myself from trying not to show off the two grains of knowledge I do have; just so I wouldn't feel stupid.
People often bring up Hitler and the Nazis in their arguments; but I have an much more interesting one. The Japanese; they were not destined to the craziness of WWII. They actually started out by aggressively building their economy and along with it their military. But they wanted to be respected by the western powers and sit at the big boy's table. But then their military industrial complex began pushing harder and harder for more aggressive excursions into the rest of Asia. Most of Asia, including China, was weak compared to Japan so they made for easy targets. So the harder the military industrial complex pushed the more success they had and resources available for the taking.
But this behavior was not really in sync with the Japanese people's desires. They didn't want their sons off fighting/dying in wonky places. They didn't want huge numbers of other people killed for their coal. So the hawks in the government and industry did their damnedest to quell any descent. People were hauled in for questioning and generally bad things happened to people who spoke out. So people quickly learned that to go along with the madness was the safest route. Thus there was no questioning of the propaganda so people could even ignore the terrible direction their country was heading.
Now we have the exact same thing happening in the western world. Grocklaw is being shut down? Make a list of the evil companies in the US and see how many of those have been shut down? None? Grocklaw is one of the few organizations that is working against the madness.
Then look at the two countries that Snowden and Assange fled to. It is madness that these are places of refuge. Even my Canada is going bonkers. I am so proud that we were where the draft dodgers came yet we recently sent a guy back to the US who effectively was a draft dodger. If Canadians had been able to vote on his stay there would have been a resounding yes. But our government is buying into this madness lock stock and barrel.
But what is the answer? Prior to WWII many Germans could see what was coming so they fled Europe. Wasn't easy but for many it saved their lives. But right now nearly every country in the world is either playing with the US; often in secret.
So again, an interesting table could be made of all the world's countries levels of Rah rah and self aggrandizement; and then compare it to a table of the least happy and free countries.
Their thinking probably goes along the lines of: each admin has a0.00003% of ratting them out each year and with a zillion admins they are looking at an 8% per year chance of a whistle blow. (Numbers came out of my ass) So if you can reduce the number of potential whistle blowers to 10% you massively reduce the chances of a whistle blow to less than one per career.
But if you have fewer admins each will have to not only have greater power due to the larger surface area but due to the whole hit by the bus thing the overlap will have to be greater. So you now have a bunch of guys with a bigger picture and better access. In that case I should invest in portable media companies as these guys are going to be running in and out with truckloads of data.
What all these agencies really need to do is to reevaluate what they are doing. This way the Snowdens still working for them will say; oh look we just used boring legal means to arrest run of the mill terrorists. Nothing to leak there.
But instead these various agencies are more concerned about covering their own asses. If I were a betting man I would guess their are more resources now deployed to catch Snowden and anyone working with him than probably the top 10 genuine terrorists put together. Not to mention the damage that they are doing to their own country. Every right they trample in their attempt to catch him just adds another exclamation point to his leaks. So services like AWS aren't going to collapse tomorrow but right now there are people all over the world looking to get their data out of the US and there are companies all over the world slowly ramping up to accept their business. You don't move your servers overnight and you don't set up data centers over night. But I suspect that you will see a slight change in the growth graph and that change is permanent.
The other key damage is even more subtle. If you are running a company such as Siemens would you probably had suspicions that China would be after your data to give to their companies. But now you might be thinking whoa is the US pulling this crap too? Now you are going to be reticent about any of your best stuff going to the US. You are going to rethink research grants to US universities. Again not overnight but all things being equal world relations with the US just chilled a few degrees.
As far as I'm concerned it is the bloated piled of McAfee that costs piles of money in lost productivity not to mention the number of embedded systems where the "Your subscription is running out" crap pops up on some jumbotron.
Trialware installs of McAfee and Norton AV are the number one reason I long ago told people to stop buying PCs with Windows on them. I don't really mind windows but I got sick of every relative begging for my help to remove all the bloatware for AV, music services, game services, etc that came with their "blank" machines. My windows buddies all say that the Microsoft AV tool is great (and free) so Dell, HP, Toshiba, etc aren't providing a service when they "offer" any of this bloatware.
I don't even like "removing" it as I don't feel that the result is a clean install. There are usually scars and grime left behind.
Often these situations can somewhat over promise but when it comes to breaking the power companies I keep my fingers crossed. But the key here is that the economics can be quite subtle. A simple example would be if this system were to provide power at an overall cost of $0.11/kwh; which is roughly what many people pay. (My point being based on a price that is roughly your present rate) So you would doubt that many people would switch. But there are many people out there who genuinely hate the power company. Lets say 3% who do. So these 3% make the cost neutral switch. No biggie except that the power company just lost 3% of their residential customers who previously (at least in my area) had no where else to turn. Still 3% isn't much. But the power company didn't lose 3% of their costs as many of their costs are fixed. So income is actually down a tad more than 3%. So this causes the power company to raise rates a bit to compensate; thus losing a few more customers. Raising rates a tad again. But the growing power rates are now making home power generation more and more attractive. At even a fairly low total loss of customers, say 10%, the power company could potentially cross a threshold where their fixed costs have remained high enough and their revenues dropped by enough that they become profitless.
In all likelihood the power company will begin insane lobbying efforts to force people to remain customers. People won't put up with that so those efforts will eventually fail. I can see a situation in some areas where the power company is government owned that the government will either outlaw or severely tax home power generation.
Now there are two other considerations which complicate the situation. The fuel cell will create much waste heat. In a hot crowded location it actually might be in the public interest to keep power generation outside of the urban heat islands.
The other consideration is that increasing home power generation may very well increase demands on things like natural gas which could result in price increases. But my guess is that much of this would be offset by the matching reductions in natural gas usage by your local power monopoly. (If it generation is done with that fuel)
My argument holds even if the home generation rates are a tiny bit higher than power company rates. But my argument isn't even needed if the home generation rates are significantly lower. Then I will laugh for the entire 5 minutes the power company tries to claim that it will survive this new technology.
So in my neighbourhood I suspect a wonderful collapse of the local power company due to the heat mostly being desired(cold winters). The power company being reviled. The natural gas prices being OK. And the fact that the local anti-fracking government is about to experience a "Throw the bums out" moment. Plus the fact that our reviled power company is doing a strange deal that some think will send our power rates soaring.
So go Diverse Energy!
I have a few friends who worked for the bigger companies and their experiences were pretty uniformly miserable. One worked directly for a big company and even though he could make opengl dance they had him working on what was basically build scripting. The others worked for game companies that did the porting of the larger games to the lower tier platforms such as the DS. These companies put a huge amount of effort into glamour (highly photogenic workspaces) but were just thankless sweatshops with the few owners being the only ones making any money.
That said, their resumes now have a golden game programming glow. So they have been able to go out into the indy/startup world and be treated like kings. Way way better than some third rate "game programming" degree or diploma program.
This is an excellent point. If you had truly random data and then xored it with 123412341234 the crappy 1234 would add very little to the cryptographic strength but it wouldn't take away from the uber random layer. Ideally you would use layer upon layer of randomness. Seeing that you don't need to generate it in realtime you would have the luxury of just piling on many very different types of randomness. This way even if it turns out that say the lava lamp has a mathematical weakness along with the rain having one you just keep adding new layers. Ideally you are using things that are so random (radioactive decay) that if anyone figures out a way to predict it they win a Nobel prize. I think predicting radioactive decay is the Nobel equivalent of a Scratch and win.
You should take a class in professional communication. You have some serious problems writing coherently.
I apologize. My excuse is that I often read/write slashdot after working a 16 hour day. My other failing is that I will hit submit and then read what I wrote as opposed to checking during the preview. This results in my realizing that I just said something like that I work a 160 hour day or a 1 hour day. My best posts are when I write 300 words and then cut it down to 80. My worst are when I leave it at 300.
And I am not being sarcastic when I ask if you could suggest the fastest quality online course in communications (I don't have a whole lot of time to spare).
"Real" news is mostly spin and BS anyhow
I fully agree; and this makes me sad.
Coffee has been shown to help in many diseases and increase longevity but seeing that caffeine is addictive I suspect that people with addictive personality problems will be the ones that drink way way too much. People with that problem no doubt indulge in all kinds of behaviors that put them in the grave earlier than is normal.
Assuming that even if the study were to eliminate those with other terrible addictions such as cocaine the people that I have met who drank too much coffee also tended to be serial daters, drove too fast, drank too much pop, gambled, drank too much during social settings (even if they weren't alcoholics) and generally led lives that were a mess. I'm not sure that eliminating coffee would have added a day to their lives.
If you have 11 guys bidding on your 10 camels then you will get a great price. If 2 of the guys buy cars so you now have 9 guys bidding for your 10 camels then you are going to get hosed. This is the same situation combined with the fact that people are angry at being abused for a long time. Being forced to pay outrageous prices for crappy programming. Then spreading out the desired channels in to 4 different packages so that we have to buy all 4 to get the 5 channels that we only wanted. Plus commercials that drive us up the wall. Moving programs around based on this weeks insider political clout of the producer. Then cancelling shows when the political clout of the producer dropped below some imaginary threshold.
Then you get the ultimate competitor, piracy. Piracy set the bar as to what the consumer can have. Basically commercial free, on demand, and with no bizarre strings such as time-limits, device limits, or weirdo delays for countries that aren't the US. All this plus it was almost free. The two gate charges were that you had to mess with torrents, and you once in a while get a dud. But Netflix showed that there is a business model that can compete with piracy. Month after month they get money from people who are now getting nearly all the benefits of piracy with none of the downsides.
Is Netflix the be all and end all? Probably not. One great quote I heard went like this, "Will Netflix become more like HBO faster than HBO will become like Netflix."
There are exceptions. Nightly news. Live sports. And highly topical TV such as Big Brother. Those don't quite fit the download netflix model.
Now where this whole thing breaks down is that I suspect that the big producers are all going to think, "Hey we can build out our own netflix with our giant library." They are wrong. If you open up your overpriced hotdog stand next to McDonald's that just went all-you-can-eat you will do 1/1000th of the business. These other companies have little hope of becoming even Pepsi to Netflix's Coke. People aren't going to drop cable to discover the wonders of Netflix at under $10 month only to start tagging on Disney, Warner, Sony, etc bringing them back up to their old obscene cable TV bill. Maybe people will subscribe to 2 services but with their all-you-can-eat libraries growing and getting better why would you need 3+ services?
The one I can't figure out is iTunes. Why would anyone buy anything that you can get on Netflix for the price of many months of Netflix? The prices on iTunes are bonkers.
I recently took a course on Cryptography and the guy basically showed that with system after system that if he could pick just the tiniest thread loose he just tossed the algorithm into the junk heap. One of the other mantras was don't roll your own; you don't have enough Phds. But when it came to things like AES he seemed pretty confident. At the time of the course I nodded my head and wasn't thinking paranoid thoughts. But if we have learned anything this last month it is that you can take your typical person you once dismissed as paranoid and multiply their ravings by 3.
So my paranoid raving #1 is that they can break any of the common encryption schemes. Some mathematicians might say pshaw but hey this is now a post Snowden world. If commonly accepted encryption isn't broken then yay!
But for those with real good data such as bankers who don't want the NSA handing the data over to Goldman Sachs (why not as they make for great conspiracy fodder) then I would only use one time pad encryption. Good luck finding a mathematically loose thread there. A simple way to do one time pad encryption is just like the old spies. You send say 5 people over to your destination each with a different 1TB memory chip containing truly random data. (radioactive decay, xored with rain xored with a lava lamp) Then when you transmit data you xor it through all 5 layers of random data.
But as for the article if I were in Europe I would move my servers to Europe tomorrow. These government goons all think alike so I suspect that even the Euro police will cooperate anyway; they'll just deny it in a different accent. For instance, I sit in Canada and don't believe for one second that the local police wouldn't pee themselves with delight if the us Feds asked them to do something.
So the giant rethink in many security setups will have to be EVERYTHING that I don't control is completely compromised. Even individual employees could be compromised. Thus I would only use data schemes that would require the blackmailing/threatening/screwing of many employees.
But the simple reality is that this requires everyone to become a Rosa Parks. Every employee at these big companies needs to step out and spill the entire truth. If one person comes out they are Snowden II. If 100 come out the party is over.
Ink jet reservoir refillable cartridges are great. (No this isn't my ebay auction) I have linked to one for a canon printer but you can get them for many other printer models. Basically these things allow you to put 120ml of ink into each colour reservoir; whereas a standard cartridge capacity is in the range of 12-20ml. So you can print and print without worrying about having to mess with the messy cartridges. Also the reservoirs are external to the printer so you can see how much ink is remaining at a glance.
http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Empty-CISS-for-Canon-PGI-225-CLI-226-525-526-refillable-cartridge-MG5320-iX6520-/111142444021?pt=US_Ink_Cartridges&hash=item19e09b1bf5
I am going to guess that inkjet printers will use far less power in both standby and printing. Plus inkjet printers are cheaper and generally smaller/lighter for shipping.
Printers can be tricky about non-standard printer cartridges so before jumping in with refillable carts do a single printer test to make sure there is no complaining.
One theoretical limitation with inkjets is that they are not truly meant for heavy duty office use. I have seen them perform fine under heavy load but seeing that the ink is worth more than the printers having spare cheap printers where you can just swap in the old ink reservoirs would be a good idea.
Personally I just buy used printers and throw in refillables from day one. These can be had for cheap from people who found out the price of store bought refills.