I own an iPhone and have thought about jailbreaking it to bypass some of the arbitrary limitations (ie, alert sounds for email, background pictures, etc) and even though the process and product of jailbreaking the phone sounds simple and reliable, I end up not doing it because the headaches I *might* incur would be a real issue for me professionally -- thus I stick WITH the reliability of the "closed" system and the assumption that generally speaking my phone will just work, even though I might be arbitrarily limited with what I can do with my phone.
I'd like to believe that there is some kind of benevolence and mutual support driving this -- in other words, Apple really is doing it to benefit users, although I suspect there's more than a little motivation to control the market for their own business advantage.
But all in all, I think that people griping about Apple are either ideologues who would criticize any device's restrictions or they are simply jealous.
The most amusing arguments are those about an Apple monopoly -- everybody may WANT but that's different than everyone actually HAVING an iPhone.
Will it actually install to USB, or do you have to get cute and clone a SATA disk to a USB disk?
And I thought the limitation, also brought to Win7, was related to how Windows handled the USB driver load and losing the handle on its boot volume in the process.
(And I mean normally, not through the use of third-party hacks or PE mode or whatever).
I mean, it's kind of getting to the point where with USB3 drives a person really could, for many situations, not even NEED a SATA disk connection except for the fact that Windows is too retarded to boot from USB. It's not hard to see a future USB4 standard on par with or faster than a current SATA standard or a line of motherboards that for size or simplicity's sake omit SATA ports altogether.
What gives with MS refusal to allow boot from USB? Even if performance is suboptimal either from a speeds & feeds perspective or a too-many-IRQs perspective (still true with USB 3?), the flexibility it would provide would be enormous.
And maybe that's it -- maybe once Windows can boot from USB it makes it hard for MS to keep tying an install to a "PC" since Windows installed to USB is kind of independent of the PC.
REAL ala carte pricing, where I can pick and choose the channels I want? I know there's some lame version of it available now, if you call your cable company between 4:30 and 4:35 and get that one girl who smokes a lot and actually knows they can do this even though it's like $29.99 per channel when purchased ala carte?
I know there's some bullshit reason they don't do this, something along the lines of the way they "buy" channels from the networks/content producers who insist they take 10 really lame channels to get one good one, and wouldn't you know, they pass the fruits of that bad deal right on down to the viewer.
This isn't unique to cable or any other industry (although telecomm has long had a corner on it), but can't we ban the annoying billing/advertising technique of advertising some good or service for $19.99 and then running it up another $20 in tack-ons, even if half of them are for government taxes and fees?
Can't we require a service/good provider to advertise the service/goods AT THE PRICE THEY WOULD ACTUALLY COST instead of some fake low number that you can't actually pay?
The related problem they have is that the desktop OS group and the Office group have such status that any computing product must include them in some way; MS will always be burdened by the "need" to genuflect to Windows & Office in everything they do. It's hard not to see it as good business (ie, moneymaking) strategy but eventually it strangles your ability to innovate because you can't escape the desktop paradigm.
Whoever takes over after Ballmer should take a couple of billion out of the bank and setup an autonomous division in Minneapolis or someplace similar, far from Redmond. Kind of like Xerox's PARC.
Let this group develop something and make it mandatory back at the home office for marketing/Windows/Office to support it and provide technical compatibility.
but the federal government has virtually abrogated its responsibility by poor enforcement of existing immigration laws.
The problem here isn't that the Feds don't enforce the law.
I visit a friend in Bisbee, AZ once a year and you can't swing a dead cat on the road between Bisbee & Sierra Vista without hitting a half-dozen Border Patrol vehicles. It's not unusual to see handcuffed illegals sitting on horse trailers or the side of the road during enforcement sweeps. And all this is on one 20 minute stretch of road! There's a manditory (even for US citizens, which frosts me) Border patrol checkpoint (featuring paramilitary fatigues, machine guns, dogs, humvees, the whole movie) in Tombstone on the "main" route north to the Interstate.
The problem is LOCAL GOVERNMENTS don't or won't or BAN the enforcement of immigration laws. There's two main reasons that crop up:
o Local police are short on resources and getting "tied up" in immigration enforcement is an unfunded mandate that hurts policing.
o It's claimed that enforcing immigration prevents cooperation with the police among immigrant groups (many red herrings here!).
The former is a bureaucratic dodge, but almost seems justifiable; I don't know what kind of clusterfuck it is to process an illegal immigrant for the local police -- is it a 20 minute handover to the Feds? Or do they have to house and feed them until the Feds get around to transfering them to Federal custody?
The second point doesn't make sense -- documented immigrants have no reason not to cooperate with the police, illegals do -- their illegal status! Part of the reason I think police go along with it is that areas with a high concentration of illegals have major crime and gang problems and police believe that illegal immigration is less of a worry than the spillover of crime.
The common reality though, is that many of these municipalities are Democratic strongholds and they view immigration reform through a narrow prism as racist and view stopping immigration enforcement as some kind of political score they're settling against racist country club Republicans. Most of the time the practical justification has little to do with the primary ideological motivation.
I've found that the majority of fake AV programs I've run across are fairly easy to remove -- boot the system in safe mode and login as a different user and you can generally run something like Sysinternals Autoruns and delete all the startup hooks and the programs they point to. Afterwards I've found that a scan by Malwarebytes and a quick check of the infected user's personal "Startup" folder in their profile is enough to ensure the stuff is deleted.
A couple will bluescreen the machine if it is booted in safe mode, and these I just wipe and start over. But that's been a very small number.
What drives me batshit is like you, I've seen this end up on many machines not running admin, fully patched (at least MS-wise) and running good AV (different versions, too).
The users in question are also not the kind to visit BS sites or the kind to click on anything to get to porn or social networking bullshit.
I suspect banner ads exploiting third-party apps personally, but its been kind of a mystery.
None of them wanted to deploy SP 3. It was flabbergasting to me, but they just didn't want to do it.
Some fucktard in a suit gets told that they don't care about problems caused by not running SP3, running SP3 requires a bunch of money to get spent and if he spends it he doesn't get a new BMW 7 series this year.
Really, so many of these decisions have nothing to do with rationality. At some high level it comes down to some guy in a suit angling for a new car, a new house or some other luxury/status symbol.
AFAIK iPhone OS 4 will be supported on 3G models but not with a full feature set, similar to the way 3 is supported on non-3G iPhones. I think it 3GS phones will be fully supported to the extent they have the hardware for feature support (ie, video chat would be a problem because there's no front-facing camera).
As for the rest of it, you're thinking about it wrong. Buyers of gen 1 iPhones either upgraded to 3GS models for the AT&T discount or they will/can upgrade to 4th Gen models when released. Most original 3G buyers can do the same since their contract periods are up, even though from a software support perspective they don't have to (for the most part).
And 1st Gen iPhones are functionally obsolete due to their small memory, slower CPU and lack of 3G data. Sorry, the device may "still work" but that's not really the right measure.
Is it a way to make money? Sure. But I think these devices are also targeted at people who either don't mind spending the money or who actively want/need the increased features/performance and who would upgrade every six months at full price regardless.
They can obfuscate the hardware in a prototype or sample pretty easily -- unmarked chips, an epoxy layer, etc that makes the hardware very difficult to identify or understand without sophisticated tools like x-ray machines, ultraprecision machining or electronic diagnostic machines.
Again, would it stop serious competitors or real industrial espionage? No, nothing would.
That the engineer even had a choice is what makes it suspicious -- I would have suspected that strict auto-wipe/passcode settings would have been mandatory, not a user-modifiable option on a sensitive prototype. Without such a mandatory setting, Apple is in effect relying on remote wipe to make sure the device isn't breached by anyone.
I would expect that a sensitive field prototype would be required to have a 1 minute passcode lock and automatic total device wipe (including firmware) after a very small number of failed passcode entries.
Relying on remote wipe seems silly, since any serious industrial spy would put it in an RF-proof jacket ASAP and only examine it in a room sealed from outside RF to prevent remote wipe.
Now it may be that this isn't considered a terribly sensitive prototype -- maybe an early manufacturing sample being used for final testing before they ramp up to final production. They don't *want* it in the hands of the public, but they also wouldn't fire an employee who was let loose in the streets with it.
No kidding. You don't think that after this made the news, Apple wouldn't go "OK, I need everyone with a field prototype to show up in conference room F at 2 PM today. No exceptions, this takes precedence over anything else unless I have Steve's written approval otherwise."
I think its funny when Flash is used as some kind of example of freedom/openness in a platform. AFAICT, Flash is used solely to create hard-to-navigate web sites, annoying banner ads and obfuscating video to make it hard/impossible to download. Where's the freedom in that?
It reminds me of a person complaining that because they can't sign away their rights they're not free.
I'll grant you the lack of USB ports but only as a means of accessing external storage. As a portable device, it'd be nice to see the iPad support removable storage, even if that removable storage was restricted to some kind of iPad-only blob format you could only create in iTunes.
64 gigs of flash memory is nothing if you want any kind of video and audio storage.
I wonder if anyone (say, in business school) has "done the math" to find out what the actual cost/benefit is of employer-paid training is and what the cost is of being too generous.
A CIO I used to work for said the solution he came up with at a previous employer sounded expensive (which made it tough to sell) but actually solved the problem of too much and not enough employee education.
He said previously they had problems with mandatory education requirements. Employees picked training with classes taught only during business hours and scheduled them at the worst possible times in terms of business scheduling, which often put the company in the position of canceling their training. This became a lather, rinse repeat situation; one employee didn't complete any training for 3 years and it couldn't be held against him as the company made him cancel training & certification tests every time.
The "solution" became company-paid training & certification where the company agreed to cover the costs and a bonus for completion. Once it became a situation where there was no employee cost *and* a financial benefit to completion, miraculously employees figured out how to schedule and complete it in less disruptive ways.
He said it was a tough sell to the board at first but after two years the time spent at courses actually went down, the scheduling caused less chaos and required fewer fill-in temps/contractors and there was a noticeable (if immeasurable) improvement in projects -- in other words, people were actually learning something and putting it to use.
The problem I have with this video is that it takes a lot of out context and it makes the viewer assume they know what's going on.
I'd like to see the equivalent video (ie, range, clarity, time of day, etc) from at least a dozen other encounters where bonafide bad guys were killed. Is it always patently obvious who the bad guys are? Can you always tell who has a weapon and who doesn't? When friendlies on the ground are coming through, have they learned you just have to zap whatever passes some suspicion threshold lest you allow an ambush situation to be created?
The guys on the ground didn't look dangerous to me, but I was *told* they weren't dangerous and they weren't armed (this part seemed more obvious, but it's not like watching football in HD, either).
The whole city looks like someone purpose-built it for ambushing people -- walled compounds everywhere, discontinuous narrow roads, a real gauntlet maze. It doesn't actually surprise me that ground commanders have gotten used to Apache air support softening anything looking like a target on their path through the city.
And if you didn't? I can't imagine what kind of clusterfuck it is to get ambushed -- nearly impossible to land a helicopter in a lot of those locations, and even if you can you risk a secondary strike on the chopper from an RPG or sniper fire, and its probably equally complicated getting heavy armored support on site. Meanwhile the guys not dead are going batshit shooting in every direction at anything.
How is it different than the original Mac & iM
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It could be taken apart if you had the tools, but most people didn't. IIRC, the people I knew who did take apart them had special-ordered the long-handled T15 and the case cracker, and the ever-present high voltage on the exposed CRT.
And what, exactly, you were going to do inside them? At best it was a memory increase, although I suppose the SEs and SE/30s could have HDD upgrades and I think the SE/30 might have had some weird video card slot. But it was far from the Apple II and later desktop Mac models (or PCs) that are designed to be user-modifiable. iMacs have some of the common parts easily accessible, but some things are really hard to get to and the entire thing really isn't designed for disassembly.
I think the uncertainty of a nuclear response is good for us. I also think there are circumstances where a nuclear response against a state *supporter* of non-state aggressors makes sense.
It's certainly possible to make a back-channel communication to, say, Syria or Iran that we will retaliate using nuclear weapons if we believe a group linked to them is responsible for a CBN attack against the U.S. This forces them to consider limits on the non-state actors they support and how much latitude to give them in attacking the U.S. since they, the state sponsors, will pay the price for an attack against the U.S.
It's a little like the pack of miscreants in a high school class. One or two of them are causing problems, but the teacher can't tell who is causing the problem. Instead of punishing them all, the teacher states that if another offense takes place, regardless of who gets caught, the ringleader will be punished. Ultimately the ringleader either chooses to accept the punishment or act to restrain the actual bad actor. With a severe enough punishment, the ringleader is now the enforcer of the rules and not a miscreant.
In fact, this is what we should have been practicing against Mideast state terror sponsors -- a plane gets blown up over Scotland? Tripoli gets bombed. Hezbollah gets up to something? Bad day in Damascus. Ultimately we allow ourselves to get hung up on the need for "proof" of a group taking orders from a state sponsor. That shouldn't be necessary, with enough of a stick the state sponsors of terrorism should find that terrorism is not a shield from retaliation.
Re:You're the first person I've read that gets it
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Sorry, I don't think my objections are specious at all.
I've *tried* the laptop in the living room. It was more headache than it was worth. Mine does not sleep and wake well, or at least not under 4 seconds. More like 10-12, and half the time it wouldn't wake up well (this is a recurring theme for most sleep/wake setups with XP). Thus the power cord issue.
And yes, it is a nuisance to drag it in from the car every night.
Clearly the iPad doesn't fit a need for you, but it does for me.
Re:You're the first person I've read that gets it
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But since most people who ever want to check IMDB/whatever already own a laptop, the cost of an iPad is a hell of a lot for a a tiny increase in attractiveness and convenience (I speak as someone who keeps his laptop within reach of the sofa).
What makes the laptop inconvenient? The heat coming out of the bottom of it (solved with a cushion) and the 4 seconds it takes to wake up and reconnect its WiFi. Is that worth $500 to fix?
I don't own a laptop. Well I do, but it mostly lives in a bag in my car, since I use it every day for work at client sites. It's massively inconvenient to drag it into the house every day (and forget it halfway to the client the next day), and it's heavy and cumbersome to use on the couch. It takes more than 4 seconds to wake up and be usable if I let it sleep, and there's literally no good way to deal with the power cord that doesn't involve it and an extension cord across the floor.
So from a convenience perspective, it's a huge increase in convenience. I think this is generally factual and not opinion or taste.
I also think it's a meaningful increase in attractiveness and decor integration with my living room, er, my WIFE'S living room..
The rich comment just sounds like sour grapes. A netbook with comparable display size (eg, over 1024x600) is $400-500; I guess I don't see the marginally higher cost of the iPad as squandering money on something that does exactly what I'd use a netbook for, except better.
You're the first person I've read that gets it
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Everyone wants to call it a fucking computer; it's not. It's not a laptop. It's not a replacement for a laptop or a desktop.
It's something to grab on the couch to look up a movie in IMDB, check the weather for tomorrow, send/check a simple email, play a simple game and so on. Sure, you CAN do all those things with a netbook/laptop/desktop, but not as conveniently or attractively as an iPad seems to make them.
Yes, you can even do them on phones, but the iPad makes it easier to do without going blind.
The haters seem obsessed with what it's not without seeing the value of what it is. Sometimes the value in something is not in what it is but in what it is not.
Now if I can only convince my wife it's something I need...
Slashdot Mirror
I own an iPhone and have thought about jailbreaking it to bypass some of the arbitrary limitations (ie, alert sounds for email, background pictures, etc) and even though the process and product of jailbreaking the phone sounds simple and reliable, I end up not doing it because the headaches I *might* incur would be a real issue for me professionally -- thus I stick WITH the reliability of the "closed" system and the assumption that generally speaking my phone will just work, even though I might be arbitrarily limited with what I can do with my phone.
I'd like to believe that there is some kind of benevolence and mutual support driving this -- in other words, Apple really is doing it to benefit users, although I suspect there's more than a little motivation to control the market for their own business advantage.
But all in all, I think that people griping about Apple are either ideologues who would criticize any device's restrictions or they are simply jealous.
The most amusing arguments are those about an Apple monopoly -- everybody may WANT but that's different than everyone actually HAVING an iPhone.
What counts as "configure it properly"?
Will it actually install to USB, or do you have to get cute and clone a SATA disk to a USB disk?
And I thought the limitation, also brought to Win7, was related to how Windows handled the USB driver load and losing the handle on its boot volume in the process.
(And I mean normally, not through the use of third-party hacks or PE mode or whatever).
I mean, it's kind of getting to the point where with USB3 drives a person really could, for many situations, not even NEED a SATA disk connection except for the fact that Windows is too retarded to boot from USB. It's not hard to see a future USB4 standard on par with or faster than a current SATA standard or a line of motherboards that for size or simplicity's sake omit SATA ports altogether.
What gives with MS refusal to allow boot from USB? Even if performance is suboptimal either from a speeds & feeds perspective or a too-many-IRQs perspective (still true with USB 3?), the flexibility it would provide would be enormous.
And maybe that's it -- maybe once Windows can boot from USB it makes it hard for MS to keep tying an install to a "PC" since Windows installed to USB is kind of independent of the PC.
I'm guessing this still means no adblock plus and no noscript for Chrome? Without those I have no interest.
REAL ala carte pricing, where I can pick and choose the channels I want? I know there's some lame version of it available now, if you call your cable company between 4:30 and 4:35 and get that one girl who smokes a lot and actually knows they can do this even though it's like $29.99 per channel when purchased ala carte?
I know there's some bullshit reason they don't do this, something along the lines of the way they "buy" channels from the networks/content producers who insist they take 10 really lame channels to get one good one, and wouldn't you know, they pass the fruits of that bad deal right on down to the viewer.
This isn't unique to cable or any other industry (although telecomm has long had a corner on it), but can't we ban the annoying billing/advertising technique of advertising some good or service for $19.99 and then running it up another $20 in tack-ons, even if half of them are for government taxes and fees?
Can't we require a service/good provider to advertise the service/goods AT THE PRICE THEY WOULD ACTUALLY COST instead of some fake low number that you can't actually pay?
The related problem they have is that the desktop OS group and the Office group have such status that any computing product must include them in some way; MS will always be burdened by the "need" to genuflect to Windows & Office in everything they do. It's hard not to see it as good business (ie, moneymaking) strategy but eventually it strangles your ability to innovate because you can't escape the desktop paradigm.
Whoever takes over after Ballmer should take a couple of billion out of the bank and setup an autonomous division in Minneapolis or someplace similar, far from Redmond. Kind of like Xerox's PARC.
Let this group develop something and make it mandatory back at the home office for marketing/Windows/Office to support it and provide technical compatibility.
but the federal government has virtually abrogated its responsibility by poor enforcement of existing immigration laws.
The problem here isn't that the Feds don't enforce the law.
I visit a friend in Bisbee, AZ once a year and you can't swing a dead cat on the road between Bisbee & Sierra Vista without hitting a half-dozen Border Patrol vehicles. It's not unusual to see handcuffed illegals sitting on horse trailers or the side of the road during enforcement sweeps. And all this is on one 20 minute stretch of road! There's a manditory (even for US citizens, which frosts me) Border patrol checkpoint (featuring paramilitary fatigues, machine guns, dogs, humvees, the whole movie) in Tombstone on the "main" route north to the Interstate.
The problem is LOCAL GOVERNMENTS don't or won't or BAN the enforcement of immigration laws. There's two main reasons that crop up:
o Local police are short on resources and getting "tied up" in immigration enforcement is an unfunded mandate that hurts policing.
o It's claimed that enforcing immigration prevents cooperation with the police among immigrant groups (many red herrings here!).
The former is a bureaucratic dodge, but almost seems justifiable; I don't know what kind of clusterfuck it is to process an illegal immigrant for the local police -- is it a 20 minute handover to the Feds? Or do they have to house and feed them until the Feds get around to transfering them to Federal custody?
The second point doesn't make sense -- documented immigrants have no reason not to cooperate with the police, illegals do -- their illegal status! Part of the reason I think police go along with it is that areas with a high concentration of illegals have major crime and gang problems and police believe that illegal immigration is less of a worry than the spillover of crime.
The common reality though, is that many of these municipalities are Democratic strongholds and they view immigration reform through a narrow prism as racist and view stopping immigration enforcement as some kind of political score they're settling against racist country club Republicans. Most of the time the practical justification has little to do with the primary ideological motivation.
I've found that the majority of fake AV programs I've run across are fairly easy to remove -- boot the system in safe mode and login as a different user and you can generally run something like Sysinternals Autoruns and delete all the startup hooks and the programs they point to. Afterwards I've found that a scan by Malwarebytes and a quick check of the infected user's personal "Startup" folder in their profile is enough to ensure the stuff is deleted.
A couple will bluescreen the machine if it is booted in safe mode, and these I just wipe and start over. But that's been a very small number.
What drives me batshit is like you, I've seen this end up on many machines not running admin, fully patched (at least MS-wise) and running good AV (different versions, too).
The users in question are also not the kind to visit BS sites or the kind to click on anything to get to porn or social networking bullshit.
I suspect banner ads exploiting third-party apps personally, but its been kind of a mystery.
I think it's "Wenda" not Wendy.
None of them wanted to deploy SP 3. It was flabbergasting to me, but they just didn't want to do it.
Some fucktard in a suit gets told that they don't care about problems caused by not running SP3, running SP3 requires a bunch of money to get spent and if he spends it he doesn't get a new BMW 7 series this year.
Really, so many of these decisions have nothing to do with rationality. At some high level it comes down to some guy in a suit angling for a new car, a new house or some other luxury/status symbol.
AFAIK iPhone OS 4 will be supported on 3G models but not with a full feature set, similar to the way 3 is supported on non-3G iPhones. I think it 3GS phones will be fully supported to the extent they have the hardware for feature support (ie, video chat would be a problem because there's no front-facing camera).
As for the rest of it, you're thinking about it wrong. Buyers of gen 1 iPhones either upgraded to 3GS models for the AT&T discount or they will/can upgrade to 4th Gen models when released. Most original 3G buyers can do the same since their contract periods are up, even though from a software support perspective they don't have to (for the most part).
And 1st Gen iPhones are functionally obsolete due to their small memory, slower CPU and lack of 3G data. Sorry, the device may "still work" but that's not really the right measure.
Is it a way to make money? Sure. But I think these devices are also targeted at people who either don't mind spending the money or who actively want/need the increased features/performance and who would upgrade every six months at full price regardless.
They can obfuscate the hardware in a prototype or sample pretty easily -- unmarked chips, an epoxy layer, etc that makes the hardware very difficult to identify or understand without sophisticated tools like x-ray machines, ultraprecision machining or electronic diagnostic machines.
Again, would it stop serious competitors or real industrial espionage? No, nothing would.
But it would stop Engadget.
That the engineer even had a choice is what makes it suspicious -- I would have suspected that strict auto-wipe/passcode settings would have been mandatory, not a user-modifiable option on a sensitive prototype. Without such a mandatory setting, Apple is in effect relying on remote wipe to make sure the device isn't breached by anyone.
Except on an airplane or anywhere else there's no high speed internet.
It sure sounds like a marketing stunt.
I would expect that a sensitive field prototype would be required to have a 1 minute passcode lock and automatic total device wipe (including firmware) after a very small number of failed passcode entries.
Relying on remote wipe seems silly, since any serious industrial spy would put it in an RF-proof jacket ASAP and only examine it in a room sealed from outside RF to prevent remote wipe.
Now it may be that this isn't considered a terribly sensitive prototype -- maybe an early manufacturing sample being used for final testing before they ramp up to final production. They don't *want* it in the hands of the public, but they also wouldn't fire an employee who was let loose in the streets with it.
No kidding. You don't think that after this made the news, Apple wouldn't go "OK, I need everyone with a field prototype to show up in conference room F at 2 PM today. No exceptions, this takes precedence over anything else unless I have Steve's written approval otherwise."
And then the guy shows up with no iPhone...
I think its funny when Flash is used as some kind of example of freedom/openness in a platform. AFAICT, Flash is used solely to create hard-to-navigate web sites, annoying banner ads and obfuscating video to make it hard/impossible to download. Where's the freedom in that?
It reminds me of a person complaining that because they can't sign away their rights they're not free.
I'll grant you the lack of USB ports but only as a means of accessing external storage. As a portable device, it'd be nice to see the iPad support removable storage, even if that removable storage was restricted to some kind of iPad-only blob format you could only create in iTunes.
64 gigs of flash memory is nothing if you want any kind of video and audio storage.
I wonder if anyone (say, in business school) has "done the math" to find out what the actual cost/benefit is of employer-paid training is and what the cost is of being too generous.
A CIO I used to work for said the solution he came up with at a previous employer sounded expensive (which made it tough to sell) but actually solved the problem of too much and not enough employee education.
He said previously they had problems with mandatory education requirements. Employees picked training with classes taught only during business hours and scheduled them at the worst possible times in terms of business scheduling, which often put the company in the position of canceling their training. This became a lather, rinse repeat situation; one employee didn't complete any training for 3 years and it couldn't be held against him as the company made him cancel training & certification tests every time.
The "solution" became company-paid training & certification where the company agreed to cover the costs and a bonus for completion. Once it became a situation where there was no employee cost *and* a financial benefit to completion, miraculously employees figured out how to schedule and complete it in less disruptive ways.
He said it was a tough sell to the board at first but after two years the time spent at courses actually went down, the scheduling caused less chaos and required fewer fill-in temps/contractors and there was a noticeable (if immeasurable) improvement in projects -- in other words, people were actually learning something and putting it to use.
The problem I have with this video is that it takes a lot of out context and it makes the viewer assume they know what's going on.
I'd like to see the equivalent video (ie, range, clarity, time of day, etc) from at least a dozen other encounters where bonafide bad guys were killed. Is it always patently obvious who the bad guys are? Can you always tell who has a weapon and who doesn't? When friendlies on the ground are coming through, have they learned you just have to zap whatever passes some suspicion threshold lest you allow an ambush situation to be created?
The guys on the ground didn't look dangerous to me, but I was *told* they weren't dangerous and they weren't armed (this part seemed more obvious, but it's not like watching football in HD, either).
The whole city looks like someone purpose-built it for ambushing people -- walled compounds everywhere, discontinuous narrow roads, a real gauntlet maze. It doesn't actually surprise me that ground commanders have gotten used to Apache air support softening anything looking like a target on their path through the city.
And if you didn't? I can't imagine what kind of clusterfuck it is to get ambushed -- nearly impossible to land a helicopter in a lot of those locations, and even if you can you risk a secondary strike on the chopper from an RPG or sniper fire, and its probably equally complicated getting heavy armored support on site. Meanwhile the guys not dead are going batshit shooting in every direction at anything.
It could be taken apart if you had the tools, but most people didn't. IIRC, the people I knew who did take apart them had special-ordered the long-handled T15 and the case cracker, and the ever-present high voltage on the exposed CRT.
And what, exactly, you were going to do inside them? At best it was a memory increase, although I suppose the SEs and SE/30s could have HDD upgrades and I think the SE/30 might have had some weird video card slot. But it was far from the Apple II and later desktop Mac models (or PCs) that are designed to be user-modifiable. iMacs have some of the common parts easily accessible, but some things are really hard to get to and the entire thing really isn't designed for disassembly.
I still think it's a mistake.
I think the uncertainty of a nuclear response is good for us. I also think there are circumstances where a nuclear response against a state *supporter* of non-state aggressors makes sense.
It's certainly possible to make a back-channel communication to, say, Syria or Iran that we will retaliate using nuclear weapons if we believe a group linked to them is responsible for a CBN attack against the U.S. This forces them to consider limits on the non-state actors they support and how much latitude to give them in attacking the U.S. since they, the state sponsors, will pay the price for an attack against the U.S.
It's a little like the pack of miscreants in a high school class. One or two of them are causing problems, but the teacher can't tell who is causing the problem. Instead of punishing them all, the teacher states that if another offense takes place, regardless of who gets caught, the ringleader will be punished. Ultimately the ringleader either chooses to accept the punishment or act to restrain the actual bad actor. With a severe enough punishment, the ringleader is now the enforcer of the rules and not a miscreant.
In fact, this is what we should have been practicing against Mideast state terror sponsors -- a plane gets blown up over Scotland? Tripoli gets bombed. Hezbollah gets up to something? Bad day in Damascus. Ultimately we allow ourselves to get hung up on the need for "proof" of a group taking orders from a state sponsor. That shouldn't be necessary, with enough of a stick the state sponsors of terrorism should find that terrorism is not a shield from retaliation.
Sorry, I don't think my objections are specious at all.
I've *tried* the laptop in the living room. It was more headache than it was worth. Mine does not sleep and wake well, or at least not under 4 seconds. More like 10-12, and half the time it wouldn't wake up well (this is a recurring theme for most sleep/wake setups with XP). Thus the power cord issue.
And yes, it is a nuisance to drag it in from the car every night.
Clearly the iPad doesn't fit a need for you, but it does for me.
But since most people who ever want to check IMDB/whatever already own a laptop, the cost of an iPad is a hell of a lot for a a tiny increase in attractiveness and convenience (I speak as someone who keeps his laptop within reach of the sofa).
What makes the laptop inconvenient? The heat coming out of the bottom of it (solved with a cushion) and the 4 seconds it takes to wake up and reconnect its WiFi. Is that worth $500 to fix?
I don't own a laptop. Well I do, but it mostly lives in a bag in my car, since I use it every day for work at client sites. It's massively inconvenient to drag it into the house every day (and forget it halfway to the client the next day), and it's heavy and cumbersome to use on the couch. It takes more than 4 seconds to wake up and be usable if I let it sleep, and there's literally no good way to deal with the power cord that doesn't involve it and an extension cord across the floor.
So from a convenience perspective, it's a huge increase in convenience. I think this is generally factual and not opinion or taste.
I also think it's a meaningful increase in attractiveness and decor integration with my living room, er, my WIFE'S living room..
The rich comment just sounds like sour grapes. A netbook with comparable display size (eg, over 1024x600) is $400-500; I guess I don't see the marginally higher cost of the iPad as squandering money on something that does exactly what I'd use a netbook for, except better.
Everyone wants to call it a fucking computer; it's not. It's not a laptop. It's not a replacement for a laptop or a desktop.
It's something to grab on the couch to look up a movie in IMDB, check the weather for tomorrow, send/check a simple email, play a simple game and so on. Sure, you CAN do all those things with a netbook/laptop/desktop, but not as conveniently or attractively as an iPad seems to make them.
Yes, you can even do them on phones, but the iPad makes it easier to do without going blind.
The haters seem obsessed with what it's not without seeing the value of what it is. Sometimes the value in something is not in what it is but in what it is not.
Now if I can only convince my wife it's something I need...