And with that Apple got preferential Intel treatment that had been the domain of Dell. (Whole other story there me thinks.) Apple won't be in any rush to jeopardise this position.
Just spitballin' here, but something tells me that whatever preferential treatment Apple got when they switched the Macbooks over may well be back in Dell's hands.
Yes, the Macbook is still the darling laptop of college kids...but Apple's bread and butter has been iOS devices, which have all been in-house CPUs for years (and ARM before that). Intel doesn't get a slice of that very, very large pie. Moreover, Apple versions of Intel processors are at least somewhat custom runs, since they are all soldered in now and don't take sockets. One could argue that most laptops are designed this way and have been for some time, but their desktops (save the old tower style Mac Pro) all have soldered chips too, so there's less volume to be had there.
By contrast, Dell laptops still sell pretty well in corporate environments. Their other major division is servers, virtually all of which house Xeon processors. Dell may not be selling iPad quantities of PowerEdge units, but they're still selling a respectable number with 1/2/4/8 of Intel's CPUs.
If Apple has any preferential state with Intel left, it likely isn't due to their revenue...and when your best selling products use somebody else's silicon, that's not the fast track to endearment.
Well, first off they can milk it a bit by offering tickets to a couple named "Jack" and "Rose" if they want to get married on board, using the PR to help keep the ship in the news. Depending on how many passengers they can take at a clip, it might not take them too long to get close enough to a break-even point that they can sell the ship to Royal Caribbean or Norwegian to add to their fleets at $0.50 on the dollar. They might even pay a premium if they can keep the naming rights. If all else fails, gut it and let it be a cargo ship.
Sure, it's unlikely to be a cash cow for the original builders, but i can't imagine the Titanic II not making its money back before its decommission.
The bastards expose all your info in open files in paper documents. How unsafe is that ? Imagine being a jan who knows to make use of this !!
You must not do much work in doctor's offices. A doctor's office still using paper records, a fax machine, and a locked filing cabinet is probably keeping your records safer than at least half of the doctor's offices which use computers. On my to-do list before the end of the year is to try and get a doctor to upgrade his computer systems from Windows XP and an ISP-distributed router. Yes, in 2018, I'm still doing that because everything has 'just worked' for years and years; to a certain degree I can't fault them. However, now, they basically have to start from scratch: new server, new release of their recordkeeping software, new workstations, new router...the whole project is probably going to cost some $10,000 by time they're done, it's not like they've been saving up the past five years to do it, and they basically have to do everything in one shot, meaning there will likely be a small business loan involved to do it.
A dentist's office I work with has fairly modern stuff, but their passwords are trivial to guess and no screen timeouts, and they patently refuse to address either. Their firewall is a decade-old Linksys router and their guest Wi-Fi network isn't isolated in any meaningful sense. I literally yelled at the owner of the firm that no, I was not going to remove the passwords entirely and open up his workstation to use Remote Desktop over the public internet.
Another doctor's office I worked with has been exploring a merger for some time, so they patently refused to spend a dime on anything that still even-a-little-bit worked. To be fair, the logic was sound: if the merger went through, the parent company would be replacing basically-everything anyway. If it didn't, they had one of those agreements where the company acquiring them would pay them a hefty sum, which they did earmark explicitly to revamp their IT. The buyer just kept dragging their feet, so their domain controller was still Server 2008 (the Vista one). They're using some sort of terminal emulator to log data into an out of something that looks AS/400-like, but I can't identify it beyond its IP address. Let's not talk about file and folder permissions......
Trust me, if your doctor's office has fewer than three locations, they're probably very-not-HIPAA-compliant, to the point where I basically have more trust in the safety of doctor's offices still using paper files.
WTF is that crap? Dude, 99% of my communications are through e-mail. It's for record keeping of correspondence and ease of searching for sorted content later. It's also provides a chain of contact.
Oh, I completely agree. It's why E-mail isn't going anywhere in business...On-prem Exchange and O365/G-Suite will have a place in business correspondence for the foreseeable future. This device, however, with no Activesync, the requirement of a VPN tunnel to the upstream provider, a seemingly minimal amount of retention policies or failover capabilities and so forth...is not going to be making inroads in businesses that already have incumbent e-mail solutions in place.
Has the world gone that too fucking ADHD to only chat in IM?
I restate my original question: when was the last time someone personally e-mailed you? Not a business correspondence, not a support request, not a listserv or similar. Compare that with the quantity of text messages you've received over the same period for personal communication.
I'm sorry, but as a Managed Service Provider (B2B based industry), Anything that requires over a paragraph in communication with the occasional file attachments will **ALWAYS** be e-mail.
Agreed, and I work for an MSP as well. You're still focused on business communication, where we agree that businesses will continue to use e-mail. This device is unsuitable for businesses, and for home users, e-mail privacy concerns are rather infrequent to hear about, especially as e-mail itself has waned in popularity in that same demographic.
E-mail will be around for the next 100+ years. The protocols i'm sure will change as will the underlying technology. But delivered messages that involves an address, subject, body, and signature will be the primary philosophical form of communications within a business.
Would you really roll this device out in a business? I wouldn't. That's my point: there is a disconnect between the demographic in which e-mail is still a primary form of communication, and the fact that this device targets a demographic that no longer considers e-mail a primary form of communication.
IM is great for short Q and A, but it will never replace the need for multi-paragraph construction.
No, but Facebook still allows for paragraphs to be transferred. I've sent relatively long SMS messages that probably could have been e-mails. Even if people still send multi-paragraph personal messages via e-mail from time to time, Facebook, texting, and similar services have supplanted enough of it. Privacy is one of the differentiators, but for many people it's one of those things that is desirable until the very first inconvenience crops up. Those who care enough are probably technical enough to utilize options like Mail-in-a-box, Zimbra, and plenty of other host-your-own solutions that don't require a VPN and a service contract.
You already have a few OSS Android-based firmwares. Seems like without Google Services these are, well, not necessarily useless - you still could make calls and browse the web with firefox and what not - but rather nothing special, so nothing that it is silly to compare them with even stock Android One.
Google services are not just tracking, it is integration of several specialized the services into an overall experience in the first place.
The issue with the OSS firmwares as an excuse is that you're right, they usually aren't comparable...but not for the reason you think.
Try using one. I can't think of a currently-sold-in-the-US Android handset that doesn't ship with a locked bootloader. I think HTC will provide a first party unlock, and I think possibly Motorola, but even those OEMs will require you surrender your warranty. So, most people end up hoping someone on XDA has managed to hack the security of the handset in order to force the bootloader open...and even if they have, it's common for OTA updates to patch those exploits, so you have to avoid updates to ensure you have the correct bootloader version, and that's a best case scenario.
So, you've got your bootloader unlocked. You've voided your warranty, you're hoping the random root tool you downloaded isn't a trojan, and you've expressed a willingness to give up some of the hardware advantages. AOSP ROMs can't use Wi-Fi calling, and they don't ship with the extensions that make the S-Pen on Note series phones do anything useful, and so forth. You've backed up all your data with Titanium Backup, and then you flash in TWRP...and you load everything, hoping the ROM works well on your particular phone, which you can't be sure of, because Android's HAL is good, but most phones have people who customize ROMs on a per-model basis, sometimes even requiring different ROMs between different carriers to deal with the different baseband modems.
So now you flash, and you decide to put up with whatever random quirks your ROM has. You're doing the same thing again next time your ROM has an update....did I mention all of this is a best case scenario?
In summary, if you can find me a phone that has both a Google-blessed ROM and an AOSP-based ROM, where users can flash either one of them with a tool direct from the OEM and still have support and their warranty, with the ONLY difference being the lack of Google services, then it's possible you can make the 'overal experience' claim. Otherwise, you're ignoring gigantic swaths of technical reasons why end users don't have much of a choice on this topic in the first place.
I think this company's bigger issue is their demographic: People who care enough about their e-mail privacy to desire to not-use Gmail, Outlook.com/Hotmail, AOL, or Yahoo, want their own server, and are neither tech savvy enough to set up Zimbra / Mail-in-a-Box / the Synology mail server, nor big enough to use Exchange...and still use e-mail.
This trail was blazed by Microsoft back around 2008-2011 with Windows Home Server - enough server to help manage backups and malware scans (using Live OneCare) and centralize media storage/sharing, enough not-server to prevent it being used for Active Directory or similar. The problem was that it was still "too much server", and they couldn't market it well enough to get average consumers to really want it.
Circling back to the subject line, e-mail is primarily a business form of communication. When was the last time you got a legit, personally-written e-mail from anyone? It's probably been a while, and even if you still correspond with $SOME_PERSON regularly that way, it's far from the de facto form of digital communication it used to be. E-mail is basically for account setup and password resets, bulk mailers, and the occasional business correspondence. Most human-to-human communication tends to take place with Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp or garden variety texting. Though people do still send and receive e-mails, it's been largely supplanted by semi-synchronous messages.
So, to review...an e-server tied to a single provider for the VPN / outbound relay, one or more annual fees to handle spam filtering, runs off Wi-Fi, doesn't fit in a server rack, isn't installable on custom hardware, and is intended to simplify a communications protocol from which home users have largely moved on?
I could be wrong...but it definitely doesn't sound like a winner to me.
They can censor all that "offensive" stuff in the US too, help ensure that the "correct" people are elected to office.
So true. That's why Democrats hold the majority of governorships, state legislatures, the Senate, the House and the Presidency. Oh wait...
You're assuming that Google sees Democrats as the "correct" people, and Republicans as the "incorrect" people. The correct people are the ones who intend to align with what's best for Google's agenda, and it is foolish to assume that this group is comprised solely of Democrats.
I work in higher ed (community/state college with only a few 4yr programs) and we were discussing G vs MS the other day. K-12 in my area also uses G and Chromebooks. [...] How do we best prepare our students in general?
At least for me personally, I think the best thing that can be done is to try and teach conceptual computing by abstracting the principles from the products. Skilled, educated students should be able to be able to compose a document with basic formatting in pretty much anything from Word to Docs to WordPerfect to Writer to AbiWord. It stopped shocking me that people don't understand how files and folders work; many think files are "in Word" because the only way they know to access their documents is using the File->Open command...and don't get me started with the wizardry that they ascribe to knowing Ctrl+O, Ctrl+S, and Ctrl+X/C/V.
Essentially, I think you're asking the wrong question, because you're debating which product to teach. Don't teach Docs or Word, teach word processing. Don't teach Sheets or Excel, teach spreadsheets. Don't teach Windows or Linux, teach file management. Don't teach Chrome or Firefox, teach web browsers. Part of the 'higher' part of 'higher education' is being exposed to lots of different things, and learning to problem solve. Most of the students who are entering the freshman year are simply not taught these skills. Part of the problem is that tech in K-12 is a train wreck. Boards and superintendents implement products based on shiny pamphlets and demo sessions, and computer teachers who are skilled at both computers and teaching are rare (so students are either taught correct information poorly or taught well but incorrect or limited information). By the time information gets to kids, they're generally better off with Youtube tutorials or self-motivated exploration of Sourceforge...except they can't do those things at school since computers can't run applications IT doesn't approve, and at home, the aging desktop is probably either a magnet for "don't touch that" or a malware-ridden train wreck of uselessness.
In conclusion, obviously a rando Slashdot commenter is not going to be a reason for the powers that be to turn around their feelings on the matter...but for whatever it's worth, teaching 'computing' rather than 'G-Suite' or 'MS Office' is what I really feel will benefit the kids the most.
This is literally just IRC with some graphics, and additional easy-to-use integrations.
9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
I can't believe I'm about to defend Slack right now. I mean, I set up a MatterMost server at work and some friends and I use Rocketchat hosted on a RasPi at home because I'm rather big on self-hosted or gtfo, but I think we, the Slashdotters, trivialize the value in the graphics and integrations.
Yes, I'm sure the majority of us would think nothing of typing sudo apt-get install ircd-hybrid on a VM somewhere and configuring it. Then, we have to get all the end users to standardize on an IRC client. Accounting isn't going to approve a hundred licenses of mIRC. So, Quassel it is, so that we can keep a single set of documentation on it for both Windows and OSX users. Now we need the mobile clients, so AndIRC for the Android folk, and...Mutter, for iOS? So really, it's three sets of documentation, which involve end users having to use "/join" and "/quit" commands. Permissions for OPs are interesting and a bit awkward, and I'm sure management just LOVES the idea of having to learn it...but they decide to do so.
Now, we deal with notification hell. Slack famously published their notification logic. How do you implement that in IRC? That's per-client, no concept of priority messages unless users are tagged, and no concept of groups except for joined rooms, meaning multiple join commands or per-user join scripts generated by IT. Also, no message threading or replying, and as much as we may well hate it, stickers and emojis aren't viable. More usefully, in-line message embedding is nonexistent, save for hyperlinks to URLs, meaning that uploading images to an image host is a requirement to share a picture. Similarly, chat history is not generally stored server side in a user-accessible manner, to say nothing of searching. Some clients will store the history client-side, which is fine until it starts using up measurable amounts of storage on the devices, or the user gets a new phone and the cache doesn't transfer.
Then, we deal with good ol' fashioned security concerns. Port 6667 is commonly blocked on public wi-fi locations, so running on a nonstandard port is a de facto requirement. The server needs to allow only authenticated users, which is a relatively uncommon config for most IRC servers I've frequented (which tend to just use nickserv to reserve usernames), and run everything over SSL.
That setup then becomes the foray of IT, to ensure it keeps working at perfect uptime, with nobody to call and yell at if there are any issues.
And that's just off the top of my head.
Yes, I 100% agree that Slack brings very little originality to the table, and has far less flexibility than IRC, which can indeed be accessed on everything from an iPhone XS to a Commodore 64, and everything in between. However, I submit that IRC had a 15-year head start to achieve the same level of professional use that Slack achieved since 2013. Sure, plenty of it is marketing, along with the fact that pretty screenshots make sense to nontechnical people in accounting and the C-suite...but the fact that the setup steps for everybody are "download app, enter e-mail/password, start chatting", on every device they are likely to use...I submit that they managed to find the pain points which prevented businesses from adopting IRC and then solved it in exchange for money.
Expectation: IoT devices end up with at least rudimentary security measures to prevent them from becoming part of botnets because of default admin passwords.
Reality: Companies will likely define "Unauthorized access and modification" as "anti-rooting/modding" requirement, and "reasonable measures" to consist of C&D letters to those who provide tools and procedures to mod their own purchased products.
So, just to make sure I understand this right, the inventory will be "whatever is popular"? The success of such a location will depend very heavily on square footage. Sure, if I'm explicitly looking for a Fire Stick or Echo speaker, I can be reasonably assured I can find it. Beyond that, I may-or-may-not find what I'm looking for. Will they have bedsheets? Rakes? Ethernet Switches? Clothing? Olive oil? If the store is the size of an average Staples, that might be big enough to have some small departments with the top 100 items kept in stock...but a store filled with impulse buys and no way to know if they you need is actually there...the website seems like a better bet.
Can you please tell me something significant that current Word can do that Word 97 couldn't do?
But yeah, the reason is that Word 97 would open in about 1/4 second flat on any modern machine. That is unacceptable, and means that an upgrade is not needed. Upgrades are the heart and soul of both the hardware and software worlds.
Word specifically? I'll give a few:
*WordArt can actually produce some visually appealing text effects. *Though not Acrobat, PDFs can be opened and edited. *Charts and tables are far easier to format. *Text wrapping around images is a task with many more options. Also, image editing tools yield far better results. *Automatic bibliography and citation generation. *Controversial as the ribbon is, 16x16 toolbar icons would be virtually impossible to use on high res displays. *Clippy is gone. *Integrated mail merge templates for common adhesive label stock. Also, mail merge doesn't completely suck anymore.
Taking a few highlights of other Office apps...
*LOTS of new transitions and animations in Powerpoint. Still poorly used, but "fly from right" was no bargain. While I'm on Powerpoint, it natively supports exporting to video files now. *Excel can use more than 65,000 rows. Also, it ships with lots of nifty and helpful templates. Also, "fill down" got really, really smart - it can figure out "first initial from Column A, last name from Column B, then add '@foobar.com' to the end". *Access 97 could only have 1GB database files; 2GB is now the max. *Outlook can now work with multiple Exchange/MAPI/Activesync accounts. Also, it's possible to set up mail using straight ActiveSync.
Now, that's just off the top of my head, and certainly not all of those appeal to everyone. they certainly don't justify the 3GB install footprint of Office 2016...but it's not like there hasn't been at least some improvement over the past few decades.
If you're looking for a small word processor, AbiWord is great...though it's been a little while since a Windows port has been updated. LibreOffice has stripped most of its Java code and starts Writer in less than 5 seconds; the suite lacks a mail client but has a system footprint that's almost 80% smaller than Office.
And yet, you're still using Windows. At this point, Microsoft knows that they own you and your laptop. Why should they care what you want when they know you will keep paying and promoting them regardless of what they do to you?
Because Microsoft keeps dropping hints about Windows as a Service. People will put up with a whole lot of pain, but everybody has a breaking point, and for a lot of people, that point is going to end up being "money to run a my other programs". There are plenty of people who have been willing to pay $99 a year for Office, but with Google Docs and LibreOffice both being free and 'good enough' for lots of people, renewal money won't be the gravy train MS thinks it will be for users who don't use the suite regularly.
Chromebooks are pretty ubiquitous and pretty inexpensive. As much as I'm wary of Google personally, most people don't seem to care too much and Google's generally-secure platform that is super easy to use and doesn't require a subscription fee is compelling for many.
For all the questionable missteps that Apple has made on their laptop line, virtually every piece of media creation software that doesn't run on Linux does run on OSX. The last five years' worth of MacBooks are generally good machines for that demographic.
Dealing with lengthy and unnecessary updates is not the sort of thing that engenders good will from Windows users, but for many, it's far more tolerable than having to pay a monthly bill to run their third party software. Getting people to switch OSes is hard, but it becomes far easier when MS becomes the first to charge for an OS in a world where nobody else charges for OSes at all. Dealing with them might remain easy for now, but at some point, people will say "no more", and by then, it will be too late.
It's dreadful, really. Women and men in weaker positions getting all uppity and refusing to just shut up like good little peons.
Any professor that would house a student is just asking to lose their career.
You've certainly demonstrated we live in the age of wild fearmongering.
You're completely missing the point. Ol Olsoc isn't saying that sexual misconduct is acceptable or that people should remain silent about abuse against them when it happens.
What he is saying is that students sharing living space with professors is the sort of arrangement that is only a matter of time before a problem arises. On the positive side, the #metoo movement likely dissuades professors from participating if they don't have enough self control to keep their sexual encounters limited to consensual ones.
On the negative side, a false accusation would still be career ending. Even if the argument is that such accusations are infrequent, it's a tough sell to try and argue that the number of false accusations would decrease when students and professors are sharing living space.
But let's assume that every student and every professor manages to avoid non-consensual sexual encounters with each other, 100% of the time.Given that a university is far more likely to side with a student than a professor in a he-said-she-said situation, it's still risky for other reasons. If jewelry suddenly goes missing, how would one even attempt to investigate the student? How many rules is the professor allowed to set about what the student can and cannot do in the professor's home? Does the professor have the ability to evict a student if they so choose, or are they required to keep them through the semester?
Really, the answer is that the college needs to expand the number of on-prem dorms and be done with it. There are so many ways this can turn into a massive issue for everybody.
coaxial cable port with no cable card slot or usb port needed to link the SDV tunner for SDV cable systems.
That's not a given. The article doesn't indicate anything about the technical aspects of the device; CableCARD tuners and set-top boxes still need a coax line.
I wouldn't be surprised if it had to do with other things. Cable providers know their end users would likely flock to an Apple STB, which they would own outright and cost them tens of millions of dollars in rental fees every year if even a fraction of subscribers moved over to them...and trying to charge the same money for the CableCARDs would draw regulatory attention. Boxes they didn't own would also either require Verizon and Comcast and Cox and Time Warner and Altice to either agree with Apple on a standard for on-demand and PPV programming, or both forego the revenue entirely (which includes UFC and boxing events that can easily cost $100) and make their customers angry at them for the inability to get PPV content. Apple probably would have required additional infrastructure investment in the same way they required it of AT&T for Visual Voicemail, and the nature of how cable TV is sold in America means that attempting an exclusivity agreement would not be beneficial to either company, since Apple would be locking out a market segment who can't switch to the exclusive carrier and conversely, people couldn't switch to them if they wanted.
So, all in all, *everybody* knows that an Apple TV with a regular cable tuner would absolutely be disruptive to the cable industry...and since the ISPs are not the sort of folk who take kindly to disruption, it's unsurprising that such a product wouldn't get off the ground.
I think a major part of the issue is that the amount of notifications people get daily are very high. App developers generate notifications based on what's best for the developer, rather than the end user. No mobile game has ever needed notifications (I *might* make an exception for asynchronous turn-based games), but all of them push you to let their game send notifications. The F2P games do the whole "new daily special" sort of thing where logging in needs to be habitual in order to get in-game bonuses. CNN pushes notifications basically every time Donald Trump tweets...also, Twitter has incessant notifications. Instagram and Snapchat remind users of expiring stories, a purely artificial need for them. And through all of this noise, there are the texts and e-mails and Whatsapp messages for which a notification is legitimately warranted.
The notifications drawer is the new inbox, and like e-mail before it, it's in need of a spam filter.
The trouble with the creation of a spam filter is a matter of who writes the rules for it. If end users are responsible for their spam filters, then app devs will simply constantly nag or bump their incentives to be whitelisted, and nothing changes. If Apple and Google do it, they are then going to find themselves on very shaky ground if the Fox News app gets to display three notifications but MSNBC only gets two. If a third party like Barracuda or Scrollout makes a utility for notification filtering, not only do they end up with the same problem (albeit with a bit more leeway than Apple or Google would since it wouldn't be default/integrated behavior), Apple/Google would have to make some sort of a special API for them that wouldn't be available to regular devs in order to avoid those devs using the same APIs to make an end run around the filters, which now starts causing other issues about what sort of lower-level APIs should be available and who gets to be a notification filter, and so forth.
So yes, let's solve this problem. However, assigning responsibility to somebody is the first step.
I know that many do not like this, but without unions you have the large forcing the small.
Unions have their own set of issues. Now, don't get me wrong, I think both Amazon and Wal-Mart have gotten to the point where a union is needed to provide a counterbalance, but the folks who have issues with unions don't have those issues because they believe large corporations should be able to do whatever they want to their employees.
Unions help negotiate contracts for workers. That's generally a good thing. However, union strikes cause issues for people who aren't part of the problem - think transit union strikes that cause people who rely on them to be late for work for a week straight...unions in general have a poor track record for attempting to mitigate collateral damage.
Unions defend their employees. This is great for those times when employees need a lawyer to combat a false accusation claim. However, many of the police officers who shot unarmed citizens managed to avoid any sort of consequence because the union went to bat for them. For less extreme examples, it's highly exceptional for a union to refuse to defend an employee who is legitimately unproductive and causes other employees to have to pick up the slack. The phrase "good enough for union work" is not a resounding affirmation of excellence. Similarly, when a job is legitimately done and fewer workers are needed to complete the work, instead of fighting for a good severance package and networking with other unions to facilitate a seamless employment experience for everyone, unions will instead fight to retain positions for employees who really aren't needed.
After a while, unions do what they're supposed to do and get things back to a reasonable balance between employers (who expect productivity in exchange for money) and workers (who want enough money to pay their bills and have a reasonable expectation of not landing in the hospital from a work-related injury). However, unions seldom step back once things are in order; given enough time, most unions will start to focus on self-justification. Once this happens, unions start to become liabilities to everyone. Unions start to become more demanding than the employers from whom the employees needed protection. This makes non-union options more appealing to everyone, including the members.
The pendulum is now at the level with Amazon and Wal-Mart where unions are very likely to do some good. Though tangential, I'd even throw Uber into the mix as well. However, the "unions aren't a good thing" mentality isn't coming from a disdain for workers, but the realization that "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely"is not a paradigm which considers unions to be exempt.
I mean, maybe there's a smidge of a thing somwhere in here...but let's be real: it's not like India is incapable of rolling their own alternatives. In aggregate, they've got enough programming talent, and it's not like WhatsApp is some unicorn of an app that has impossible-to-replicate requirements. If India wanted to make a legit alternative to Android, WhatsApp, and Youtube, they are not lacking in the human or technical resources to do it within a very short period of time. It might take a little bit for the network effect to kick in, but if North Korea can roll their own Linux distro, it is well within the realm of India to provide competitive applications.
Counterargument: That's not the point. This isn't an iPhone keynote where hype generation is a part of the process. RasPi has been being on having an open source hardware design and a low barrier to entry that enables everything from amateur electronics with its GPIO to being an inexpensive first computer for programming and development to the ability to turn it into an appliance for anything from a Chromecast alternative to a home automation system powered by an Ocarina. It may not have whizbang features or a breakneck release pace, but I think there's at least some value to the fact that adding "Raspberry Pi" to your search string will likely provide a tutorial that won't be obsolete on the next release.
Firstly, to my knowledge, it's STILL 100Mbit networking isn't it? Routed through USB somehow?
It's technically closer to 300Mbits or so. The original release (or two) had 10/100 ports, so putting the ethernet port on the USB 2.0 bus wasn't an issue. They added gigabit, but changing it from being a USB device to being its own thing would have required a whole lot of reinventing the wheel and sacrificed backwards compatibility. Not to say that 38MBytes/sec isn't a number worthy of improvement, it is...but let's keep some perspective here: External hard drives won't go much faster than that because they're on the same bus with the same limits. I've yet to see a MicroSD card that can sustain those rates for any meaningful amount of time. Sure, we'd like it to go true gigabit, but it's typically not a requirement...and if it is, the RasPi isn't worth the effort.
Also the CPU is almost good enough to perform light level NAS functionality now. Again, that ethernet letting you down.
And the USB bus, and the other bottlenecks that aren't going away for a $35 system board. If the intent is to configure a Pi as a NAS, it probably makes more sense to just buy a QNAP..
I don't understand how someone could ever think this could work.
They were depending on people like me. See, I subscribe to Netflix...but I watch approximately 20 hours a year, so Netflix makes a solid profit margin on me. There are probably enough Netflix subscribers like me where the binge watchers are subsidized, and it all evens out because both of us want to pay a flat rate.
The problem Moviepass had was that they lacked balance. People like me weren't going to sign up because the half-a-dozen times a year I go to the movies is about the same cost as an annual Moviepass subscription - I'd have to go to the movies more often to justify it. The people who were going to jump on the deal were the people who were already going to the movies very regularly, so selling them movie tickets for less than half of what they were already paying just wasn't going to go their way.
Moviepass could have fared better if they limited themselves from the beginning - "$10 for 10 movies a month, but while you pick the days, we pick the show times". They could have partnered with the movie theaters to better distribute crowds during off-peak showings and banked on making up the balance at the concession stands, or at least having the seats available during prime time for full-priced customers. It would help limit the exposure of the theaters, it would set an expectation, and could be beneficial for everyone involved.
I'm unsurprised that the service, as advertised, ended up here.
The reality was Apple nut checked Microsoft as it blew by them in the end-user market with iPhone and Apple services. Amazon (an online e-commerce bazaar at that) Chuck Norris'ed kicked them to the face with AWS with cloud services. And Google laughed from the sidelines and then stuck up at the end to goose pinch them as they blew past them into the schools with Chromebooks.
I don't 100% disagree with this, but there is definitely revisionist history here.
Apple did indeed manage to outdo Microsoft, no question about it. However, Ballmer wasn't asleep at the wheel here. Remember, MS had mobile phones in a pre-Facebook, pre-Instagram, pre-Spotify, pre-App-store, pre-reasonably-priced-data-plan world. They had a healthy presence in a three horse race, with their larger competition was Blackberry for the enterprise. Palm's focus on simplicity was not gaining them a whole lot of ground. Apple started with a really good feature phone and improved upon it, and while they did ultimately succeed, at the time targeting the enterprise by making really good e-mail devices with centralized management - which they did pretty well. MS tried rebooting its platform so much that it became pointless for developers to target it, and it took them far too long to get their music/tv/movie ecosystem together while simultaneously competing with the iTunes libraries that EVERYONE had at the time.
AWS is again undoubtedly a success, but a whole lot of their money is made by people who simply weren't Microsoft's core market. Windows Server / SQL Server users commonly had on-premise installations and an upgrade cadence of some kind in place. Yes, plenty of very big firms use AWS, but it really got its start in startup world where AWS was able to replace the rack full of servers in a colo that was a tremendous up-front expense for startups that didn't yet have a reliable customer base. It was largely an untapped market that was timed very well with startup apps that needed a scalable backend. Moreover, Amazon was able to start AWS very inexpensively since they started out selling time on servers they only used during the busy holiday season and sat idle most of the year, while Microsoft doesn't have that sort of resource lying around in the same way Amazon does. Yes, Azure is playing catch-up, but they're also doing so while doing far more to target businesses with an existing on-prem Microsoft infrastructure. You can buy generic server time on Azure, but MS has an existing client base they're looking to leverage with easy migration tools and drop-in replacements for their on-prem software. That's a bit of a different sort of thing than AWS.
As for Chromebooks, they're winning in no small part because of how inexpensive the hardware is along with parents and superintendents who don't think past making budget. I'm not saying that Microsoft should be doing better than Google solely by virtue of their respective platforms, but I am saying that if Chromebooks cost the same as entry level x86 laptops running Windows and Office in conjunction with educational IT's default requirement of super-locked-down computers anyway, Chromebooks may not have won out.
Now in a panic rush Microsoft is pivoting and everything is up in the air. Competing products, misaligned consumer and enterprise offerings, a kitchen sink approach to cloud services. It's a hot sticky mess.
I'll agree with at least some of this. Yes, Microsoft is pivoting because the expectation of paying for an OS is basically gone...a problem felt far more by Microsoft than by everyone else who hasn't really charged for OSes in the classical sense. They're continuing to milk Office, but Google Docs and LibreOffice continue to improve. SQL Server is still popular in the SMB market, but the amount of software developed for a full MS stack rather than LAMP certainly isn't increasing. I agree that the infighting and the poor distinction between consumer and business lines is not helping them, but I also think that if Nadella is smart, he'll admit that it isn't necessarily the worst possible fate to join the ranks of SAP and Oracle, being a primarily enterprise company that nobody likes but everybody pays.
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Samsung is the one vendor still keeping most of these features around.
IR blasting, removable batteries, physical/reprogrammable buttons, and unlocked bootloaders would like to have a word with you.
And with that Apple got preferential Intel treatment that had been the domain of Dell. (Whole other story there me thinks.) Apple won't be in any rush to jeopardise this position.
Just spitballin' here, but something tells me that whatever preferential treatment Apple got when they switched the Macbooks over may well be back in Dell's hands.
Yes, the Macbook is still the darling laptop of college kids...but Apple's bread and butter has been iOS devices, which have all been in-house CPUs for years (and ARM before that). Intel doesn't get a slice of that very, very large pie. Moreover, Apple versions of Intel processors are at least somewhat custom runs, since they are all soldered in now and don't take sockets. One could argue that most laptops are designed this way and have been for some time, but their desktops (save the old tower style Mac Pro) all have soldered chips too, so there's less volume to be had there.
By contrast, Dell laptops still sell pretty well in corporate environments. Their other major division is servers, virtually all of which house Xeon processors. Dell may not be selling iPad quantities of PowerEdge units, but they're still selling a respectable number with 1/2/4/8 of Intel's CPUs.
If Apple has any preferential state with Intel left, it likely isn't due to their revenue...and when your best selling products use somebody else's silicon, that's not the fast track to endearment.
But what then?
Well, first off they can milk it a bit by offering tickets to a couple named "Jack" and "Rose" if they want to get married on board, using the PR to help keep the ship in the news. Depending on how many passengers they can take at a clip, it might not take them too long to get close enough to a break-even point that they can sell the ship to Royal Caribbean or Norwegian to add to their fleets at $0.50 on the dollar. They might even pay a premium if they can keep the naming rights. If all else fails, gut it and let it be a cargo ship.
Sure, it's unlikely to be a cash cow for the original builders, but i can't imagine the Titanic II not making its money back before its decommission.
For many doctor's offices with EMR systems, paper files in locked cabinets would probably be an improvement for security.
It's mind-blowing Toronto people would fall for this.
They're not.
From the summary:
" The advisory panel was attended "in good faith," she said, but showed "a blatant disregard for resident concerns about data."
The bastards expose all your info in open files in paper documents. How unsafe is that ? Imagine being a jan who knows to make use of this !!
You must not do much work in doctor's offices. A doctor's office still using paper records, a fax machine, and a locked filing cabinet is probably keeping your records safer than at least half of the doctor's offices which use computers. On my to-do list before the end of the year is to try and get a doctor to upgrade his computer systems from Windows XP and an ISP-distributed router. Yes, in 2018, I'm still doing that because everything has 'just worked' for years and years; to a certain degree I can't fault them. However, now, they basically have to start from scratch: new server, new release of their recordkeeping software, new workstations, new router...the whole project is probably going to cost some $10,000 by time they're done, it's not like they've been saving up the past five years to do it, and they basically have to do everything in one shot, meaning there will likely be a small business loan involved to do it.
A dentist's office I work with has fairly modern stuff, but their passwords are trivial to guess and no screen timeouts, and they patently refuse to address either. Their firewall is a decade-old Linksys router and their guest Wi-Fi network isn't isolated in any meaningful sense. I literally yelled at the owner of the firm that no, I was not going to remove the passwords entirely and open up his workstation to use Remote Desktop over the public internet.
Another doctor's office I worked with has been exploring a merger for some time, so they patently refused to spend a dime on anything that still even-a-little-bit worked. To be fair, the logic was sound: if the merger went through, the parent company would be replacing basically-everything anyway. If it didn't, they had one of those agreements where the company acquiring them would pay them a hefty sum, which they did earmark explicitly to revamp their IT. The buyer just kept dragging their feet, so their domain controller was still Server 2008 (the Vista one). They're using some sort of terminal emulator to log data into an out of something that looks AS/400-like, but I can't identify it beyond its IP address. Let's not talk about file and folder permissions......
Trust me, if your doctor's office has fewer than three locations, they're probably very-not-HIPAA-compliant, to the point where I basically have more trust in the safety of doctor's offices still using paper files.
WTF is that crap? Dude, 99% of my communications are through e-mail. It's for record keeping of correspondence and ease of searching for sorted content later. It's also provides a chain of contact.
Oh, I completely agree. It's why E-mail isn't going anywhere in business...On-prem Exchange and O365/G-Suite will have a place in business correspondence for the foreseeable future. This device, however, with no Activesync, the requirement of a VPN tunnel to the upstream provider, a seemingly minimal amount of retention policies or failover capabilities and so forth...is not going to be making inroads in businesses that already have incumbent e-mail solutions in place.
Has the world gone that too fucking ADHD to only chat in IM?
I restate my original question: when was the last time someone personally e-mailed you? Not a business correspondence, not a support request, not a listserv or similar. Compare that with the quantity of text messages you've received over the same period for personal communication.
I'm sorry, but as a Managed Service Provider (B2B based industry), Anything that requires over a paragraph in communication with the occasional file attachments will **ALWAYS** be e-mail.
Agreed, and I work for an MSP as well. You're still focused on business communication, where we agree that businesses will continue to use e-mail. This device is unsuitable for businesses, and for home users, e-mail privacy concerns are rather infrequent to hear about, especially as e-mail itself has waned in popularity in that same demographic.
E-mail will be around for the next 100+ years. The protocols i'm sure will change as will the underlying technology. But delivered messages that involves an address, subject, body, and signature will be the primary philosophical form of communications within a business.
Would you really roll this device out in a business? I wouldn't. That's my point: there is a disconnect between the demographic in which e-mail is still a primary form of communication, and the fact that this device targets a demographic that no longer considers e-mail a primary form of communication.
IM is great for short Q and A, but it will never replace the need for multi-paragraph construction.
No, but Facebook still allows for paragraphs to be transferred. I've sent relatively long SMS messages that probably could have been e-mails. Even if people still send multi-paragraph personal messages via e-mail from time to time, Facebook, texting, and similar services have supplanted enough of it. Privacy is one of the differentiators, but for many people it's one of those things that is desirable until the very first inconvenience crops up. Those who care enough are probably technical enough to utilize options like Mail-in-a-box, Zimbra, and plenty of other host-your-own solutions that don't require a VPN and a service contract.
You already have a few OSS Android-based firmwares. Seems like without Google Services these are, well, not necessarily useless - you still could make calls and browse the web with firefox and what not - but rather nothing special, so nothing that it is silly to compare them with even stock Android One.
Google services are not just tracking, it is integration of several specialized the services into an overall experience in the first place.
The issue with the OSS firmwares as an excuse is that you're right, they usually aren't comparable...but not for the reason you think.
Try using one. I can't think of a currently-sold-in-the-US Android handset that doesn't ship with a locked bootloader. I think HTC will provide a first party unlock, and I think possibly Motorola, but even those OEMs will require you surrender your warranty. So, most people end up hoping someone on XDA has managed to hack the security of the handset in order to force the bootloader open...and even if they have, it's common for OTA updates to patch those exploits, so you have to
avoid updates to ensure you have the correct bootloader version, and that's a best case scenario.
So, you've got your bootloader unlocked. You've voided your warranty, you're hoping the random root tool you downloaded isn't a trojan, and you've expressed a willingness to give up some of the hardware advantages. AOSP ROMs can't use Wi-Fi calling, and they don't ship with the extensions that make the S-Pen on Note series phones do anything useful, and so forth. You've backed up all your data with Titanium Backup, and then you flash in TWRP...and you load everything, hoping the ROM works well on your particular phone, which you can't be sure of, because Android's HAL is good, but most phones have people who customize ROMs on a per-model basis, sometimes even requiring different ROMs between different carriers to deal with the different baseband modems.
So now you flash, and you decide to put up with whatever random quirks your ROM has. You're doing the same thing again next time your ROM has an update....did I mention all of this is a best case scenario?
In summary, if you can find me a phone that has both a Google-blessed ROM and an AOSP-based ROM, where users can flash either one of them with a tool direct from the OEM and still have support and their warranty, with the ONLY difference being the lack of Google services, then it's possible you can make the 'overal experience' claim. Otherwise, you're ignoring gigantic swaths of technical reasons why end users don't have much of a choice on this topic in the first place.
I think this company's bigger issue is their demographic: People who care enough about their e-mail privacy to desire to not-use Gmail, Outlook.com/Hotmail, AOL, or Yahoo, want their own server, and are neither tech savvy enough to set up Zimbra / Mail-in-a-Box / the Synology mail server, nor big enough to use Exchange...and still use e-mail.
This trail was blazed by Microsoft back around 2008-2011 with Windows Home Server - enough server to help manage backups and malware scans (using Live OneCare) and centralize media storage/sharing, enough not-server to prevent it being used for Active Directory or similar. The problem was that it was still "too much server", and they couldn't market it well enough to get average consumers to really want it.
Circling back to the subject line, e-mail is primarily a business form of communication. When was the last time you got a legit, personally-written e-mail from anyone? It's probably been a while, and even if you still correspond with $SOME_PERSON regularly that way, it's far from the de facto form of digital communication it used to be. E-mail is basically for account setup and password resets, bulk mailers, and the occasional business correspondence. Most human-to-human communication tends to take place with Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp or garden variety texting. Though people do still send and receive e-mails, it's been largely supplanted by semi-synchronous messages.
So, to review...an e-server tied to a single provider for the VPN / outbound relay, one or more annual fees to handle spam filtering, runs off Wi-Fi, doesn't fit in a server rack, isn't installable on custom hardware, and is intended to simplify a communications protocol from which home users have largely moved on?
I could be wrong...but it definitely doesn't sound like a winner to me.
They can censor all that "offensive" stuff in the US too, help ensure that the "correct" people are elected to office.
So true. That's why Democrats hold the majority of governorships, state legislatures, the Senate, the House and the Presidency. Oh wait...
You're assuming that Google sees Democrats as the "correct" people, and Republicans as the "incorrect" people. The correct people are the ones who intend to align with what's best for Google's agenda, and it is foolish to assume that this group is comprised solely of Democrats.
I work in higher ed (community/state college with only a few 4yr programs) and we were discussing G vs MS the other day. K-12 in my area also uses G and Chromebooks. [...] How do we best prepare our students in general?
At least for me personally, I think the best thing that can be done is to try and teach conceptual computing by abstracting the principles from the products. Skilled, educated students should be able to be able to compose a document with basic formatting in pretty much anything from Word to Docs to WordPerfect to Writer to AbiWord. It stopped shocking me that people don't understand how files and folders work; many think files are "in Word" because the only way they know to access their documents is using the File->Open command...and don't get me started with the wizardry that they ascribe to knowing Ctrl+O, Ctrl+S, and Ctrl+X/C/V.
Essentially, I think you're asking the wrong question, because you're debating which product to teach. Don't teach Docs or Word, teach word processing. Don't teach Sheets or Excel, teach spreadsheets. Don't teach Windows or Linux, teach file management. Don't teach Chrome or Firefox, teach web browsers. Part of the 'higher' part of 'higher education' is being exposed to lots of different things, and learning to problem solve. Most of the students who are entering the freshman year are simply not taught these skills.
Part of the problem is that tech in K-12 is a train wreck. Boards and superintendents implement products based on shiny pamphlets and demo sessions, and computer teachers who are skilled at both computers and teaching are rare (so students are either taught correct information poorly or taught well but incorrect or limited information).
By the time information gets to kids, they're generally better off with Youtube tutorials or self-motivated exploration of Sourceforge...except they can't do those things at school since computers can't run applications IT doesn't approve, and at home, the aging desktop is probably either a magnet for "don't touch that" or a malware-ridden train wreck of uselessness.
In conclusion, obviously a rando Slashdot commenter is not going to be a reason for the powers that be to turn around their feelings on the matter...but for whatever it's worth, teaching 'computing' rather than 'G-Suite' or 'MS Office' is what I really feel will benefit the kids the most.
This is literally just IRC with some graphics, and additional easy-to-use integrations.
9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
I can't believe I'm about to defend Slack right now. I mean, I set up a MatterMost server at work and some friends and I use Rocketchat hosted on a RasPi at home because I'm rather big on self-hosted or gtfo, but I think we, the Slashdotters, trivialize the value in the graphics and integrations.
Yes, I'm sure the majority of us would think nothing of typing sudo apt-get install ircd-hybrid on a VM somewhere and configuring it. Then, we have to get all the end users to standardize on an IRC client. Accounting isn't going to approve a hundred licenses of mIRC. So, Quassel it is, so that we can keep a single set of documentation on it for both Windows and OSX users. Now we need the mobile clients, so AndIRC for the Android folk, and...Mutter, for iOS? So really, it's three sets of documentation, which involve end users having to use "/join" and "/quit" commands. Permissions for OPs are interesting and a bit awkward, and I'm sure management just LOVES the idea of having to learn it...but they decide to do so.
Now, we deal with notification hell. Slack famously published their notification logic. How do you implement that in IRC? That's per-client, no concept of priority messages unless users are tagged, and no concept of groups except for joined rooms, meaning multiple join commands or per-user join scripts generated by IT. Also, no message threading or replying, and as much as we may well hate it, stickers and emojis aren't viable. More usefully, in-line message embedding is nonexistent, save for hyperlinks to URLs, meaning that uploading images to an image host is a requirement to share a picture. Similarly, chat history is not generally stored server side in a user-accessible manner, to say nothing of searching. Some clients will store the history client-side, which is fine until it starts using up measurable amounts of storage on the devices, or the user gets a new phone and the cache doesn't transfer.
Then, we deal with good ol' fashioned security concerns. Port 6667 is commonly blocked on public wi-fi locations, so running on a nonstandard port is a de facto requirement. The server needs to allow only authenticated users, which is a relatively uncommon config for most IRC servers I've frequented (which tend to just use nickserv to reserve usernames), and run everything over SSL.
That setup then becomes the foray of IT, to ensure it keeps working at perfect uptime, with nobody to call and yell at if there are any issues.
And that's just off the top of my head.
Yes, I 100% agree that Slack brings very little originality to the table, and has far less flexibility than IRC, which can indeed be accessed on everything from an iPhone XS to a Commodore 64, and everything in between. However, I submit that IRC had a 15-year head start to achieve the same level of professional use that Slack achieved since 2013. Sure, plenty of it is marketing, along with the fact that pretty screenshots make sense to nontechnical people in accounting and the C-suite...but the fact that the setup steps for everybody are "download app, enter e-mail/password, start chatting", on every device they are likely to use...I submit that they managed to find the pain points which prevented businesses from adopting IRC and then solved it in exchange for money.
The coffee is also poisoned.
At the rate this world is going, I'm failing to see the downsides involved here.
Expectation: IoT devices end up with at least rudimentary security measures to prevent them from becoming part of botnets because of default admin passwords.
Reality: Companies will likely define "Unauthorized access and modification" as "anti-rooting/modding" requirement, and "reasonable measures" to consist of C&D letters to those who provide tools and procedures to mod their own purchased products.
So, just to make sure I understand this right, the inventory will be "whatever is popular"? The success of such a location will depend very heavily on square footage. Sure, if I'm explicitly looking for a Fire Stick or Echo speaker, I can be reasonably assured I can find it. Beyond that, I may-or-may-not find what I'm looking for. Will they have bedsheets? Rakes? Ethernet Switches? Clothing? Olive oil? If the store is the size of an average Staples, that might be big enough to have some small departments with the top 100 items kept in stock...but a store filled with impulse buys and no way to know if they you need is actually there...the website seems like a better bet.
Can you please tell me something significant that current Word can do that Word 97 couldn't do?
But yeah, the reason is that Word 97 would open in about 1/4 second flat on any modern machine. That is unacceptable, and means that an upgrade is not needed. Upgrades are the heart and soul of both the hardware and software worlds.
Word specifically? I'll give a few:
*WordArt can actually produce some visually appealing text effects.
*Though not Acrobat, PDFs can be opened and edited.
*Charts and tables are far easier to format.
*Text wrapping around images is a task with many more options. Also, image editing tools yield far better results.
*Automatic bibliography and citation generation.
*Controversial as the ribbon is, 16x16 toolbar icons would be virtually impossible to use on high res displays.
*Clippy is gone.
*Integrated mail merge templates for common adhesive label stock. Also, mail merge doesn't completely suck anymore.
Taking a few highlights of other Office apps...
*LOTS of new transitions and animations in Powerpoint. Still poorly used, but "fly from right" was no bargain. While I'm on Powerpoint, it natively supports exporting to video files now.
*Excel can use more than 65,000 rows. Also, it ships with lots of nifty and helpful templates. Also, "fill down" got really, really smart - it can figure out "first initial from Column A, last name from Column B, then add '@foobar.com' to the end".
*Access 97 could only have 1GB database files; 2GB is now the max.
*Outlook can now work with multiple Exchange/MAPI/Activesync accounts. Also, it's possible to set up mail using straight ActiveSync.
Now, that's just off the top of my head, and certainly not all of those appeal to everyone. they certainly don't justify the 3GB install footprint of Office 2016...but it's not like there hasn't been at least some improvement over the past few decades.
If you're looking for a small word processor, AbiWord is great...though it's been a little while since a Windows port has been updated. LibreOffice has stripped most of its Java code and starts Writer in less than 5 seconds; the suite lacks a mail client but has a system footprint that's almost 80% smaller than Office.
And yet, you're still using Windows. At this point, Microsoft knows that they own you and your laptop. Why should they care what you want when they know you will keep paying and promoting them regardless of what they do to you?
Because Microsoft keeps dropping hints about Windows as a Service. People will put up with a whole lot of pain, but everybody has a breaking point, and for a lot of people, that point is going to end up being "money to run a my other programs". There are plenty of people who have been willing to pay $99 a year for Office, but with Google Docs and LibreOffice both being free and 'good enough' for lots of people, renewal money won't be the gravy train MS thinks it will be for users who don't use the suite regularly.
Chromebooks are pretty ubiquitous and pretty inexpensive. As much as I'm wary of Google personally, most people don't seem to care too much and Google's generally-secure platform that is super easy to use and doesn't require a subscription fee is compelling for many.
For all the questionable missteps that Apple has made on their laptop line, virtually every piece of media creation software that doesn't run on Linux does run on OSX. The last five years' worth of MacBooks are generally good machines for that demographic.
Dealing with lengthy and unnecessary updates is not the sort of thing that engenders good will from Windows users, but for many, it's far more tolerable than having to pay a monthly bill to run their third party software. Getting people to switch OSes is hard, but it becomes far easier when MS becomes the first to charge for an OS in a world where nobody else charges for OSes at all. Dealing with them might remain easy for now, but at some point, people will say "no more", and by then, it will be too late.
We live in the age of #metoo.
It's dreadful, really. Women and men in weaker positions getting all uppity and refusing to just shut up like good little peons.
Any professor that would house a student is just asking to lose their career.
You've certainly demonstrated we live in the age of wild fearmongering.
You're completely missing the point. Ol Olsoc isn't saying that sexual misconduct is acceptable or that people should remain silent about abuse against them when it happens.
What he is saying is that students sharing living space with professors is the sort of arrangement that is only a matter of time before a problem arises. On the positive side, the #metoo movement likely dissuades professors from participating if they don't have enough self control to keep their sexual encounters limited to consensual ones.
On the negative side, a false accusation would still be career ending. Even if the argument is that such accusations are infrequent, it's a tough sell to try and argue that the number of false accusations would decrease when students and professors are sharing living space.
But let's assume that every student and every professor manages to avoid non-consensual sexual encounters with each other, 100% of the time.Given that a university is far more likely to side with a student than a professor in a he-said-she-said situation, it's still risky for other reasons. If jewelry suddenly goes missing, how would one even attempt to investigate the student? How many rules is the professor allowed to set about what the student can and cannot do in the professor's home? Does the professor have the ability to evict a student if they so choose, or are they required to keep them through the semester?
Really, the answer is that the college needs to expand the number of on-prem dorms and be done with it. There are so many ways this can turn into a massive issue for everybody.
coaxial cable port with no cable card slot or usb port needed to link the SDV tunner for SDV cable systems.
That's not a given. The article doesn't indicate anything about the technical aspects of the device; CableCARD tuners and set-top boxes still need a coax line.
I wouldn't be surprised if it had to do with other things. Cable providers know their end users would likely flock to an Apple STB, which they would own outright and cost them tens of millions of dollars in rental fees every year if even a fraction of subscribers moved over to them...and trying to charge the same money for the CableCARDs would draw regulatory attention. Boxes they didn't own would also either require Verizon and Comcast and Cox and Time Warner and Altice to either agree with Apple on a standard for on-demand and PPV programming, or both forego the revenue entirely (which includes UFC and boxing events that can easily cost $100) and make their customers angry at them for the inability to get PPV content. Apple probably would have required additional infrastructure investment in the same way they required it of AT&T for Visual Voicemail, and the nature of how cable TV is sold in America means that attempting an exclusivity agreement would not be beneficial to either company, since Apple would be locking out a market segment who can't switch to the exclusive carrier and conversely, people couldn't switch to them if they wanted.
So, all in all, *everybody* knows that an Apple TV with a regular cable tuner would absolutely be disruptive to the cable industry...and since the ISPs are not the sort of folk who take kindly to disruption, it's unsurprising that such a product wouldn't get off the ground.
I think a major part of the issue is that the amount of notifications people get daily are very high. App developers generate notifications based on what's best for the developer, rather than the end user. No mobile game has ever needed notifications (I *might* make an exception for asynchronous turn-based games), but all of them push you to let their game send notifications. The F2P games do the whole "new daily special" sort of thing where logging in needs to be habitual in order to get in-game bonuses. CNN pushes notifications basically every time Donald Trump tweets...also, Twitter has incessant notifications. Instagram and Snapchat remind users of expiring stories, a purely artificial need for them. And through all of this noise, there are the texts and e-mails and Whatsapp messages for which a notification is legitimately warranted.
The notifications drawer is the new inbox, and like e-mail before it, it's in need of a spam filter.
The trouble with the creation of a spam filter is a matter of who writes the rules for it. If end users are responsible for their spam filters, then app devs will simply constantly nag or bump their incentives to be whitelisted, and nothing changes. If Apple and Google do it, they are then going to find themselves on very shaky ground if the Fox News app gets to display three notifications but MSNBC only gets two. If a third party like Barracuda or Scrollout makes a utility for notification filtering, not only do they end up with the same problem (albeit with a bit more leeway than Apple or Google would since it wouldn't be default/integrated behavior), Apple/Google would have to make some sort of a special API for them that wouldn't be available to regular devs in order to avoid those devs using the same APIs to make an end run around the filters, which now starts causing other issues about what sort of lower-level APIs should be available and who gets to be a notification filter, and so forth.
So yes, let's solve this problem. However, assigning responsibility to somebody is the first step.
I know that many do not like this, but without unions you have the large forcing the small.
Unions have their own set of issues. Now, don't get me wrong, I think both Amazon and Wal-Mart have gotten to the point where a union is needed to provide a counterbalance, but the folks who have issues with unions don't have those issues because they believe large corporations should be able to do whatever they want to their employees.
Unions help negotiate contracts for workers. That's generally a good thing. However, union strikes cause issues for people who aren't part of the problem - think transit union strikes that cause people who rely on them to be late for work for a week straight...unions in general have a poor track record for attempting to mitigate collateral damage.
Unions defend their employees. This is great for those times when employees need a lawyer to combat a false accusation claim. However, many of the police officers who shot unarmed citizens managed to avoid any sort of consequence because the union went to bat for them. For less extreme examples, it's highly exceptional for a union to refuse to defend an employee who is legitimately unproductive and causes other employees to have to pick up the slack. The phrase "good enough for union work" is not a resounding affirmation of excellence. Similarly, when a job is legitimately done and fewer workers are needed to complete the work, instead of fighting for a good severance package and networking with other unions to facilitate a seamless employment experience for everyone, unions will instead fight to retain positions for employees who really aren't needed.
After a while, unions do what they're supposed to do and get things back to a reasonable balance between employers (who expect productivity in exchange for money) and workers (who want enough money to pay their bills and have a reasonable expectation of not landing in the hospital from a work-related injury). However, unions seldom step back once things are in order; given enough time, most unions will start to focus on self-justification. Once this happens, unions start to become liabilities to everyone. Unions start to become more demanding than the employers from whom the employees needed protection. This makes non-union options more appealing to everyone, including the members.
The pendulum is now at the level with Amazon and Wal-Mart where unions are very likely to do some good. Though tangential, I'd even throw Uber into the mix as well. However, the "unions aren't a good thing" mentality isn't coming from a disdain for workers, but the realization that "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely"is not a paradigm which considers unions to be exempt.
I mean, maybe there's a smidge of a thing somwhere in here...but let's be real: it's not like India is incapable of rolling their own alternatives. In aggregate, they've got enough programming talent, and it's not like WhatsApp is some unicorn of an app that has impossible-to-replicate requirements. If India wanted to make a legit alternative to Android, WhatsApp, and Youtube, they are not lacking in the human or technical resources to do it within a very short period of time. It might take a little bit for the network effect to kick in, but if North Korea can roll their own Linux distro, it is well within the realm of India to provide competitive applications.
and the features kinda stagnant.
Counterargument: That's not the point. This isn't an iPhone keynote where hype generation is a part of the process. RasPi has been being on having an open source hardware design and a low barrier to entry that enables everything from amateur electronics with its GPIO to being an inexpensive first computer for programming and development to the ability to turn it into an appliance for anything from a Chromecast alternative to a home automation system powered by an Ocarina. It may not have whizbang features or a breakneck release pace, but I think there's at least some value to the fact that adding "Raspberry Pi" to your search string will likely provide a tutorial that won't be obsolete on the next release.
Firstly, to my knowledge, it's STILL 100Mbit networking isn't it? Routed through USB somehow?
It's technically closer to 300Mbits or so. The original release (or two) had 10/100 ports, so putting the ethernet port on the USB 2.0 bus wasn't an issue. They added gigabit, but changing it from being a USB device to being its own thing would have required a whole lot of reinventing the wheel and sacrificed backwards compatibility. Not to say that 38MBytes/sec isn't a number worthy of improvement, it is...but let's keep some perspective here: External hard drives won't go much faster than that because they're on the same bus with the same limits. I've yet to see a MicroSD card that can sustain those rates for any meaningful amount of time. Sure, we'd like it to go true gigabit, but it's typically not a requirement...and if it is, the RasPi isn't worth the effort.
Also the CPU is almost good enough to perform light level NAS functionality now. Again, that ethernet letting you down.
And the USB bus, and the other bottlenecks that aren't going away for a $35 system board. If the intent is to configure a Pi as a NAS, it probably makes more sense to just buy a QNAP..
I don't understand how someone could ever think this could work.
They were depending on people like me. See, I subscribe to Netflix...but I watch approximately 20 hours a year, so Netflix makes a solid profit margin on me. There are probably enough Netflix subscribers like me where the binge watchers are subsidized, and it all evens out because both of us want to pay a flat rate.
The problem Moviepass had was that they lacked balance. People like me weren't going to sign up because the half-a-dozen times a year I go to the movies is about the same cost as an annual Moviepass subscription - I'd have to go to the movies more often to justify it. The people who were going to jump on the deal were the people who were already going to the movies very regularly, so selling them movie tickets for less than half of what they were already paying just wasn't going to go their way.
Moviepass could have fared better if they limited themselves from the beginning - "$10 for 10 movies a month, but while you pick the days, we pick the show times". They could have partnered with the movie theaters to better distribute crowds during off-peak showings and banked on making up the balance at the concession stands, or at least having the seats available during prime time for full-priced customers. It would help limit the exposure of the theaters, it would set an expectation, and could be beneficial for everyone involved.
I'm unsurprised that the service, as advertised, ended up here.
The reality was Apple nut checked Microsoft as it blew by them in the end-user market with iPhone and Apple services. Amazon (an online e-commerce bazaar at that) Chuck Norris'ed kicked them to the face with AWS with cloud services. And Google laughed from the sidelines and then stuck up at the end to goose pinch them as they blew past them into the schools with Chromebooks.
I don't 100% disagree with this, but there is definitely revisionist history here.
Apple did indeed manage to outdo Microsoft, no question about it. However, Ballmer wasn't asleep at the wheel here. Remember, MS had mobile phones in a pre-Facebook, pre-Instagram, pre-Spotify, pre-App-store, pre-reasonably-priced-data-plan world. They had a healthy presence in a three horse race, with their larger competition was Blackberry for the enterprise. Palm's focus on simplicity was not gaining them a whole lot of ground. Apple started with a really good feature phone and improved upon it, and while they did ultimately succeed, at the time targeting the enterprise by making really good e-mail devices with centralized management - which they did pretty well. MS tried rebooting its platform so much that it became pointless for developers to target it, and it took them far too long to get their music/tv/movie ecosystem together while simultaneously competing with the iTunes libraries that EVERYONE had at the time.
AWS is again undoubtedly a success, but a whole lot of their money is made by people who simply weren't Microsoft's core market. Windows Server / SQL Server users commonly had on-premise installations and an upgrade cadence of some kind in place. Yes, plenty of very big firms use AWS, but it really got its start in startup world where AWS was able to replace the rack full of servers in a colo that was a tremendous up-front expense for startups that didn't yet have a reliable customer base. It was largely an untapped market that was timed very well with startup apps that needed a scalable backend. Moreover, Amazon was able to start AWS very inexpensively since they started out selling time on servers they only used during the busy holiday season and sat idle most of the year, while Microsoft doesn't have that sort of resource lying around in the same way Amazon does. Yes, Azure is playing catch-up, but they're also doing so while doing far more to target businesses with an existing on-prem Microsoft infrastructure. You can buy generic server time on Azure, but MS has an existing client base they're looking to leverage with easy migration tools and drop-in replacements for their on-prem software. That's a bit of a different sort of thing than AWS.
As for Chromebooks, they're winning in no small part because of how inexpensive the hardware is along with parents and superintendents who don't think past making budget. I'm not saying that Microsoft should be doing better than Google solely by virtue of their respective platforms, but I am saying that if Chromebooks cost the same as entry level x86 laptops running Windows and Office in conjunction with educational IT's default requirement of super-locked-down computers anyway, Chromebooks may not have won out.
Now in a panic rush Microsoft is pivoting and everything is up in the air. Competing products, misaligned consumer and enterprise offerings, a kitchen sink approach to cloud services. It's a hot sticky mess.
I'll agree with at least some of this. Yes, Microsoft is pivoting because the expectation of paying for an OS is basically gone...a problem felt far more by Microsoft than by everyone else who hasn't really charged for OSes in the classical sense. They're continuing to milk Office, but Google Docs and LibreOffice continue to improve. SQL Server is still popular in the SMB market, but the amount of software developed for a full MS stack rather than LAMP certainly isn't increasing. I agree that the infighting and the poor distinction between consumer and business lines is not helping them, but I also think that if Nadella is smart, he'll admit that it isn't necessarily the worst possible fate to join the ranks of SAP and Oracle, being a primarily enterprise company that nobody likes but everybody pays.