That makes no sense. I have one of the smallest (and cheapest) Android phones and it has the full complement of radios and a microSD slot along with a compass and gyro. A faster CPU/GPU isn't any larger than a slow, crappy and cheap one, the big difference is power drain. Mine has a 1000ma battery and is pretty small, suitable only for a low power processor. Make the battery twice as large in volume (meaning about triple the power since casing is constant) and the whole phone wouldn't be THAT much fatter. Driving a quad core processor might mean more battery than can comfortably fit but a dual core with a VGA display and a useable camera should be very doable. But that product doesn't exist.
I carried a Palm III and then a Handspring Visor for decade. I thought the size was the biggest negative. Now phones are even larger in height and width but a little thinner in most cases. Good grief. Which is why I looked around and got a tiny import Android phone with a puny 2.3" screen, just to carry something small for a change.
If I wanted to carry a tablet around I'd buy a frickin tablet. And that might be an option to consider if a tablet could replace both my laptop and phone but they currently can't. Even if you buy a tablet with a cell link they never seem to allow them to make a call or send a SMS text, but with a BT earpiece or a good speakerphone implementation a tablet could serve as a phone, it is just an arbitrary 'product differentiation' decision that disallows the option. Meanwhile tablets with keyboards are getting close to the lower bound of laptop territory. So someday I might be able to replace two devices with one... but not today.
I would like to think that is why it happened. Either he realized it on his own or some other fellow judges took him aside and 'explained' it to him. You can't throw out words like 'enemy' and still pretend to be impartial.
For example, at present I can only think of a couple of opponents that would rise to the level of 'enemy' for the US. New Zealand most certainly does not. And anyone there who sees the US as an enemy isn't just wrong, they are insane.
At present our enemy list has approximatly two entries:
1. Al Qaeda & the taliban. They are in an active war against us here, in Afganistan and elsewhere. An enemy.
2. North Korea. Since a formal end of the Korean War has yet to be concluded we are all (remember that it was basically the UN vs North Korea) formally 'at war' with the Norks so they qualify as an enemy.
Other than those we have many countries/entities we are in disputes with, some might advance to enemy/war but they might not. Iran comes to mind. China is a rival but we all pray things never deteriorate to the point where words like 'enemy' make sense because that is a future we don't want to see. Russia is one to watch and worry about our relationship with, but since the fall of the Soviet Union we don't have an enemy in that part of the world.
I meant nothing more than that a more powerful machine allows you to do new things or old things faster. Nothing in a word processor is likely to see an improvement though so buying the latest smoking hot machine isn't likely to make you a better author. But even they can probably benefit from a dual display setup with their work on one and notes/webpages/search/etc. on another.
On the other hand a new machine that allows you to mix twice as many audio tracks in realtime is instantly better. Might even make your creative output better, might not. But having to stop and mixdown a few tracks to an intermediate just because your hardware isn't fast enough will certainly break your rhythm. And faster renders at higher quality is obviously better for a 3d animator working on the motion of an animated character. Pushing the edge of the latest available hardware can be an important competitive advantage. Being able to edit HD video vs SD instantly decides on an upgrade, most five year old machines will struggle with just playing back 1080p video, mixing multiple such streams with effects will tax even the fastest current production machines. Now forget consumer streams and deal with motion jpeg or raw lossless compressed frames. Yea you need more iron and will want to ride the upgrade train for years to come.
Actually, broadcast TV is threatened like never before. Cable is a split model where the cable companies and the cable only channels make money from both subscriptions and advertising. And streaming video is threatening to rip them both a new one. Cable at $50-$100+/mo vs Netflix for $10 or Amazon for the cost of Prime.
Radio would be dead except it costs almost nothing to keep a station on the air with the current model of total automation and the statutory licensing model of paying royalties for the music here in the US.
Please note the important difference between free software and free services. If you release a piece of free software it costs almost nothing more if a million people download it vs a thousand. On the other hand if lots of people download and use it you are almost certain to get contributions in the form of feature enhancements, patches and bug reports; and history shows that you are likely to eventually generate enough general activity around the project to produce revenue. If not enough revenue to cover all development costs, certainly enough to cover the hosting bills since those scale fairly closely with general interest. The beauty of the cost of reproduction being as close to zero as to not make a difference is at the heart of the Free Software success story.
Now compare to free services like facebook. Every incremental user costs money. The only way, so far, to generate offsetting revenue is by ruthlessly marketing the users to advertisers. But users don't like that and venture capitalists are eager to throw money into the 'next big thing' so you are competing against free.
This is still 500,000 times what Newsweek sold for. So I guess it means failure in digital is still worth more than a failed dead tree product.
All social media sites can expect to share this fate soon enough with the exceptions of facebook, twitter and a couple more than will survive for a bit. The whole model depends on scaling up to 'too big to fail' before the initial money runs out. And of course 'too big to fail' also fails eventually, see myspace and any number of other dead and forgotten sites that had their fifteen minutes.
The only way to make money in this game is to piss off the users as you slap them in the face with the reality that they aren't customers.... they are the product. Yet the sole reason a social media site exists is because users want to be there, the defining feature is there is little created/curated content on a social media site, it is all user created. And since users aren't really tied to a site they are free to be fickle and jump to the next shiny thing they can share links to cat videos on. Which all means it is fairly easy to get a crapload of users, just give em free services; making a living giving away stuff to zillions of users is still a hard and mostly unsolved problem. Google is making money giving stuff away, anyone else?
Translation: I didn't give a shit about security and worked around it for my convience. I didn't give two rats asses if I passed private information through totally unsecured servers at Google and anyone at Google with legit (or not) access to the servers with that data on them. I passed information I was obligated to protect the privacy of right through who knows how many unsecured pathways between work, google and home. I managed to leave before getting fired when a major scandal broke in the newspapers and now work somewhere where everybody does this sort of crap out in the open so I no longer even worry about it.
You are the reason privacy breaches happen. Which was what I was getting at in my first post, make up your mind whether you actually give a crap about privacy/security/etc or not. Then follow Yoda's advice. And sometimes forgetting about it might be the better call, a lot of stuff gets locked down for little real reason. And some stuff really should be kept private.
> unless you're one of those lusers who thinks that "PC" means "Windows".
For purposes of this discussion it pretty much does. Consider the other two options, Apple's OS X products are close enough in complexity to Windows to drop their tiny market share into the same bucket and traditional desktop Linux certainly isn't for the 'only needed a tablet' crowd.
People bought Windows PCs because they needed web/mail/Office and it wasn't permitted to sell an appliance because Microsoft wouldn't have allowed it. Thus most people bought a PC with Windows and yuppies with plenty of disposable income sprung for a Mac. But even a Mac was way more complicated and flexible than most people needed.
> A brand new machine is hardly better than a 5 years old one, so why replace them before they break completely?
If that is your attitude you probably are one of those people I was talking about who needed a tablet all along.
A PC built today is actually a lot better than one from five years ago, especially if you spend the same money. But if all you are doing is running Firefox on it you won't see much advantage. Or for that matter, if you are running Office you won't see a difference. But if you are pushing the edge you will. From a developer to a gamer, from 3d modeling to hi-def video editing to even sound mixing, a new machine will still improve productivity. And a new machine for a serious user now would almost certainly be equipped with multiple displays while five years ago that was still fairly uncommon.
This isn't a tech problem. Therefore it can't be solved with tech. You don't allow information that you are obligated to protect the privacy of leave your control. Doesn't matter if it is android, a laptop or a briefcase full of files. The other option is roll the dice and hope you aren't there when the press show up to cover the breach. Choose. And if your boss insists you do it anyway make the sum-bitch put the order in writing so your butt is covered when the poop hits the fan. Because sooner or later... BOOM!
Staff should not be mobile with private information unless absolutely required to do their job and the number of those people haven't changed a lot. Field work is still field work and office is still the office. And the solutions haven't changed a lot either. Avoid copying more information to a portable device than absolutely required to do the job. And with today's connectivity live connection to a remote app is usually the way to go. Only at the edges can tech play a role. Design it right, control it right and you won't get bit in the ass when (not if) the crypto and other fancy tech fails in the hands of end users.
Nah, he used it in the modern corporate sense. If sales aren't going up, Up, UP every quarter then they might as well be dead. Smaller players will begin to pull out, big players will see their share prices tank, etc. Tech companies are structured on the basis of ever growing sales and profits so the idea of a nice stable market would be death to them and they probably won't have time to restructure.
Longer term, sales will probably go down. For a long time millions and millions of people who had no business buying a PC were buying them because of the Windows monopoly, to get access to basic things like email, word processing and basic web/media consumption. Those users are going to finally go away and stop demanding that the PC be turned into what they wanted all along, a simple device without confusing options, flexibility or programability.
But people who always needed the power of a PC will continue needing one so they aren't going to go away.
Translation: Security/privacy is just a joke. We will waste a little tax money on security theater and fattening up a preferred vendor but we really don't care. Give me the shiny toy.
> YOU DON'T ALLOW ANYBODY TO WORK WITH IT OR LOOK AT IT.
No, you have to assume your own people are somewhat safe, at least at the level of access you grant each one. Although you also have audit trails of who accesses/changes what to keep everyone honest.
But the second it leaves the front door you aren't trusting the user anymore, you are trusting the user to be able to retain possession in a hostile environment. Or you are trusting them to actually use the secure features correctly. Do you deal with end users? It only takes ONE to screw up.
BYOD fails before you even start, the premise is broken. I'm expected to secure a device I don't own or even have ultimate control of? Eh? And if the user was skilled enough to do all that stuff, or even understand why circumventing the security policy is a bad idea, he/she would probably be working in IT.
You might make it work somewhat if you only allow web apps or similar remote viewing access with no information ever stored on the uncontrolled device but even that has problems. Security access tokens vulnerable, screen caps, cut/paste, etc.
Nice propeller spinning but forget all that crap and lets get real.
If you want to enforce privacy of information you do two simple things.
YOU DON"T F*CKING ALLOW IT TO WALK OUT THE FRONT DOOR.
YOU DON"T ALLOW IT TO BE MOVED TO DEVICES OUTSIDE OF YOUR DIRECT CONTROL.
So just say no to BYOD, let em screech and bitch all they want. Tell em straight up, if your can't work without your precious iPad then go find an employer who doesn't need to deal with laws enforcing privacy. And good luck with that in this crappy economy. Just say no to portable devices, period, unless there is a truly compelling need. Data collection and off site archiving come to mind.
Otherwise admit you really don't care about privacy at all and get on with it and, again, you don't need to spend a lot of money on tech that won't actually work when it comes to crunch time with end user idiots.
So? It still resolves down to misunderstanding exactly what is meant by 'admin'. Whoever has admin/root can do whatever they darned well want.... or at least until the DRM hammer falls. But because they don't want end users to understand that they are blowing smoke up everyone's butt and removing a feature most of us consider a waste of cycles and memory but some people actually like.
Not at all. What did I just speak of that isn't a firm matter of record? Not a conspiracy theory, not secret knowledge known only to the select, open source information available to all.... but furiously ignored by most because to look would require action.
Read Mr. Obama's written works. Sure he had a lot of help from ghost writers but the contents can certainly be taken as representing how he wants to be viewed. He gives the game away but nobody actually read either of his books, they just bought them and displayed them to be seen as 'hip' and 'informed.' Now read a few more very public sources of information. Go read some of the history of his parents, both what is in Jr.s books and elsewhere. Dad was thrown out of a socialist (proudly, avowedly socialist) government in Kenya for being too extreme. Not extreme as in capitialist running dog lackey of the colonialists, the other extreme. Saying Mom was just a crazy hippy fellow traveller would be an understatement. The white grandparents were at least fellow travellers and lets not forget card carrying Frank Marshal Davis, the substitute father figure/mentor.
Obama himself writes about being proud of hanging with the marxists, hippies, etc. so as not to be seen as a 'sellout.' Uh huh. So not a communist. And yes in-godamned-deed he was a paidup member of the New Party. And 'Rev' Wright was part of an unholy trinity of himself, a socialist pretending to be a protestant minister, Phlager pretending to be a priest and Farakan pretending to be a muslim. Go read Wright's holy book: hint, it ain't the Holy Bible it is by a Professor Cone. A bit hard to find the actual books about now but plenty of excerpts online to give ya the flavor.
As for being muslim to communist, again go to the words of Mr. Obama himself and the few bit of paper trail we have. He was enrolled in school to receive religious training as a muslim by his stepfather. The only known religious instruction he received as a child was that. As an adult we know of no conversion to another traditional religious sort of faith, thus I feel justified in assuming he is still a communist. Again, Rev. Wright doesn't count as Christian. Have you read that 'church's' statement of principles? I have. It mentions 'Africa' many times, to zero for Jesus. Call me crazy but I haven't seen a Christian church that managed to skip the whole Christ part.
TB was pretty much a solved problem in the 1st world. Then we decided we couldn't force people into quarantine to ensure they got proper treatment and to prevent the spread of such a readily transmissible disease. And then AIDS pitched in to help brew up especially virilent strains in immune compromised patients with no self control. Add in the general problem if drug resistence and we have a major epidemic waiting to happen. Who knows where it will go nuts, but sooner or later... BAM!
Best I can tell from what passes as thought in the politically correct set, diseases got rights or something. Or people got the right to not get treated and to pass on the crap they catch. I really can't decipher it.
But don't worry, this is all the evil Republican's fault. ObamaCare^WTax will fix all these problems.
> Your definition of "innovate" is apparently so narrow that even somebody building a fucking rocket isn't "innovating" because "you know...
No, I'd say it wasn't too innovative if you just bought rocket motors, gyros, etc. off the shelf and stuck em on a slightly differently shaped body and launched it AFTER Sputnik. Which was what the iPod was. They bought hdds off the rack, put em in a bog standard plastic body with a quite typical display and added in a scroll wheel they licensed from somebody else. They introduced it into a market already full of portable digital music players of various sorts. All they added was the look of the case, the software, the iTunes store and a big heaping helping of the patented RDF. The rest was, as I said, productizing and marketing.
Which was why we have the meme around here "no Wifi, less storage than a Nomad; lame" Cmdr. Taco underestimated the power of marketing over innovation just like Steve Jobs did all those years ago when Microsoft's inferior products were kicking his butt. Steve learned from that.
So? Note the phrase "American parents" in that. His parents were American citizens at the time Mitt was born and he was born on US soil. The Natural Born clause does not require that the parents be themselves born here, only that they be Citizens at the time. At the time I don't think the concept of dual citizenship existed so if the parents were citizens the child couldn't have any other loyalties. The better question mark is Rubio: there is some debate as to when his parents achieved US Citizenship.
There is a good question of how George Romney was qualified to run in 1964 but his candidacy was so brief that apparently no real oppo research was initiated against him so the subject never came up. But even then, both parents were American Citizens with undivided loyalty even if the child was born while abroad. We have already enshrined the notion that being born outside the strictly defined territory of the US can be acceptable when by unamious decree of Congress it was determined that Senator McCain was qualified for the office even though he was born at a U.S. Navy facility located on foreign soil. None were willing to publicly dispute that the offspring of a U.S. Naval Officer on active duty service to the United States qualifies regardless of where born but it does put the proverbial camel's nose under the tent.
> Everyone expects some radical change that no one has thought of, but that has never ever happened in the consumer space.
Sure it happens. Just not very often, and as I said originally, sometimes even from Apple. The Apple ][ was innovative, new and a breakthrough. Little of the actual tech was invented by Steve & Steve but the idea of making a whole machine (unlike say the Altair and other contemporary units) for retail consumption was a fairly new idea at the time. All of the tech in the original Mac came from elsewhere (mostly PARC) but it was still a big departure from what was selling before.
But the iProducts of late not so much. Nothing in the iPod was invented at Apple and except for being the first to get ahold of the new 1.8" form factor HDDs (invented by others), the scroll wheel (licensed tech) and the very old idea of a walled garden was a late comer to the portable digital music player market. I guess the notion of selling the walled garden as a feature instead of a bug is a sort of dark innovation. The iPhone certainly didn't break much ground in the smartphone space, that was well established by Microsoft, RIM, Palm and others by the time Apple showed up. The iPad was nothing but a bigger iPhone. Apple of course blew the size of those markets right through the roof with their productizing and marketing prowess. It is what they do now, take other people's innovation and make the 'product you guys should have made' and sell millions and millions of em.
So lets get this right. Not only is Microsoft planning innovate for the first time, they plan to go right to out innovating Apple... as if THEY[1] do much of it themselves but whatever. And not only that they are going to suddenly be innovating on 'all fronts.' Can't wait to see this plan fail.
[1] Apple productizes. Apple markets. They even integrate well. But mostly they are a design and marketing company.
> Unless Obama really is Satan incarnate (or a socialist Kenyan Muslim terrorist, > I'm not sure which is worse), then there's not too much to worry about
I'd say from the available evidence that Obama is most likely a communist/socialist with Muslim roots in much the way that most American socialists have Christian roots. But communism is a religion (albiet a godless one) so you can't really be one AND a theist. Not a terrorist but sympathetic to their goals and like most of the professional left seem enamored with violent anti-liberal thugs to the point of making excuses for their violent means of achieving their ends. Because in their secret hearts they lack only the public support to use violent means themselves.
He wasn't born in Kenya but unless the reason for hiding the birth cert is to hide a dark family secret, he is not a Natural Born Citizen in the sense of the requirement to be POTUS. Being born in HI makes him an American Citizen but it requires both parents to be a citizen at the time of birth to qualify as Natural Born and BHO Sr. was not and was never known to have even contemplated naturalization.
The natural born requirement was designed to prevent people with divided loyalty from being entrusted with the fairly unrestrained powers of POTUS. Due to his 'imteresting' biography Mr. Obama can rightly claim Kenyan, British, Indonesian or American Citizenship and or travel papers. What part of that implies 'undivided loyalty' to you?
Which is why I only clicked to the actual EO before commenting. I already knew what sort of breathless 'black helicopter' crap would await at the EPIC link. Amazing the vortex of stupid that can happen when Libertarians and the Left converge on an issue.
> but I have to admit that Clinton was a pretty good President.
Look back at the first two years and imagine that extending out to eight and you wouldn't say that. It was Clinton tempered by the Newt that turned out pretty good. Either one was unstable by themself but somehow they made it work. In other words, we got lucky. Obama is proof that sort of thing can't be relied upon and that electing dysfunctional poster children of the Oprah Generation is a really bad idea. Not sure swinging the pendelum all the way to a straight laced ramrod up his butt boy scout like Romney is a good reaction to the problem but since that is the only choice remaining....
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That makes no sense. I have one of the smallest (and cheapest) Android phones and it has the full complement of radios and a microSD slot along with a compass and gyro. A faster CPU/GPU isn't any larger than a slow, crappy and cheap one, the big difference is power drain. Mine has a 1000ma battery and is pretty small, suitable only for a low power processor. Make the battery twice as large in volume (meaning about triple the power since casing is constant) and the whole phone wouldn't be THAT much fatter. Driving a quad core processor might mean more battery than can comfortably fit but a dual core with a VGA display and a useable camera should be very doable. But that product doesn't exist.
I carried a Palm III and then a Handspring Visor for decade. I thought the size was the biggest negative. Now phones are even larger in height and width but a little thinner in most cases. Good grief. Which is why I looked around and got a tiny import Android phone with a puny 2.3" screen, just to carry something small for a change.
If I wanted to carry a tablet around I'd buy a frickin tablet. And that might be an option to consider if a tablet could replace both my laptop and phone but they currently can't. Even if you buy a tablet with a cell link they never seem to allow them to make a call or send a SMS text, but with a BT earpiece or a good speakerphone implementation a tablet could serve as a phone, it is just an arbitrary 'product differentiation' decision that disallows the option. Meanwhile tablets with keyboards are getting close to the lower bound of laptop territory. So someday I might be able to replace two devices with one... but not today.
I would like to think that is why it happened. Either he realized it on his own or some other fellow judges took him aside and 'explained' it to him. You can't throw out words like 'enemy' and still pretend to be impartial.
For example, at present I can only think of a couple of opponents that would rise to the level of 'enemy' for the US. New Zealand most certainly does not. And anyone there who sees the US as an enemy isn't just wrong, they are insane.
At present our enemy list has approximatly two entries:
1. Al Qaeda & the taliban. They are in an active war against us here, in Afganistan and elsewhere. An enemy.
2. North Korea. Since a formal end of the Korean War has yet to be concluded we are all (remember that it was basically the UN vs North Korea) formally 'at war' with the Norks so they qualify as an enemy.
Other than those we have many countries/entities we are in disputes with, some might advance to enemy/war but they might not. Iran comes to mind. China is a rival but we all pray things never deteriorate to the point where words like 'enemy' make sense because that is a future we don't want to see. Russia is one to watch and worry about our relationship with, but since the fall of the Soviet Union we don't have an enemy in that part of the world.
I meant nothing more than that a more powerful machine allows you to do new things or old things faster. Nothing in a word processor is likely to see an improvement though so buying the latest smoking hot machine isn't likely to make you a better author. But even they can probably benefit from a dual display setup with their work on one and notes/webpages/search/etc. on another.
On the other hand a new machine that allows you to mix twice as many audio tracks in realtime is instantly better. Might even make your creative output better, might not. But having to stop and mixdown a few tracks to an intermediate just because your hardware isn't fast enough will certainly break your rhythm. And faster renders at higher quality is obviously better for a 3d animator working on the motion of an animated character. Pushing the edge of the latest available hardware can be an important competitive advantage. Being able to edit HD video vs SD instantly decides on an upgrade, most five year old machines will struggle with just playing back 1080p video, mixing multiple such streams with effects will tax even the fastest current production machines. Now forget consumer streams and deal with motion jpeg or raw lossless compressed frames. Yea you need more iron and will want to ride the upgrade train for years to come.
Actually, broadcast TV is threatened like never before. Cable is a split model where the cable companies and the cable only channels make money from both subscriptions and advertising. And streaming video is threatening to rip them both a new one. Cable at $50-$100+/mo vs Netflix for $10 or Amazon for the cost of Prime.
Radio would be dead except it costs almost nothing to keep a station on the air with the current model of total automation and the statutory licensing model of paying royalties for the music here in the US.
Please note the important difference between free software and free services. If you release a piece of free software it costs almost nothing more if a million people download it vs a thousand. On the other hand if lots of people download and use it you are almost certain to get contributions in the form of feature enhancements, patches and bug reports; and history shows that you are likely to eventually generate enough general activity around the project to produce revenue. If not enough revenue to cover all development costs, certainly enough to cover the hosting bills since those scale fairly closely with general interest. The beauty of the cost of reproduction being as close to zero as to not make a difference is at the heart of the Free Software success story.
Now compare to free services like facebook. Every incremental user costs money. The only way, so far, to generate offsetting revenue is by ruthlessly marketing the users to advertisers. But users don't like that and venture capitalists are eager to throw money into the 'next big thing' so you are competing against free.
This is still 500,000 times what Newsweek sold for. So I guess it means failure in digital is still worth more than a failed dead tree product.
All social media sites can expect to share this fate soon enough with the exceptions of facebook, twitter and a couple more than will survive for a bit. The whole model depends on scaling up to 'too big to fail' before the initial money runs out. And of course 'too big to fail' also fails eventually, see myspace and any number of other dead and forgotten sites that had their fifteen minutes.
The only way to make money in this game is to piss off the users as you slap them in the face with the reality that they aren't customers.... they are the product. Yet the sole reason a social media site exists is because users want to be there, the defining feature is there is little created/curated content on a social media site, it is all user created. And since users aren't really tied to a site they are free to be fickle and jump to the next shiny thing they can share links to cat videos on. Which all means it is fairly easy to get a crapload of users, just give em free services; making a living giving away stuff to zillions of users is still a hard and mostly unsolved problem. Google is making money giving stuff away, anyone else?
> just forwarding the stuff to my gmail account
Translation: I didn't give a shit about security and worked around it for my convience. I didn't give two rats asses if I passed private information through totally unsecured servers at Google and anyone at Google with legit (or not) access to the servers with that data on them. I passed information I was obligated to protect the privacy of right through who knows how many unsecured pathways between work, google and home. I managed to leave before getting fired when a major scandal broke in the newspapers and now work somewhere where everybody does this sort of crap out in the open so I no longer even worry about it.
You are the reason privacy breaches happen. Which was what I was getting at in my first post, make up your mind whether you actually give a crap about privacy/security/etc or not. Then follow Yoda's advice. And sometimes forgetting about it might be the better call, a lot of stuff gets locked down for little real reason. And some stuff really should be kept private.
> unless you're one of those lusers who thinks that "PC" means "Windows".
For purposes of this discussion it pretty much does. Consider the other two options, Apple's OS X products are close enough in complexity to Windows to drop their tiny market share into the same bucket and traditional desktop Linux certainly isn't for the 'only needed a tablet' crowd.
People bought Windows PCs because they needed web/mail/Office and it wasn't permitted to sell an appliance because Microsoft wouldn't have allowed it. Thus most people bought a PC with Windows and yuppies with plenty of disposable income sprung for a Mac. But even a Mac was way more complicated and flexible than most people needed.
> A brand new machine is hardly better than a 5 years old one, so why replace them before they break completely?
If that is your attitude you probably are one of those people I was talking about who needed a tablet all along.
A PC built today is actually a lot better than one from five years ago, especially if you spend the same money. But if all you are doing is running Firefox on it you won't see much advantage. Or for that matter, if you are running Office you won't see a difference. But if you are pushing the edge you will. From a developer to a gamer, from 3d modeling to hi-def video editing to even sound mixing, a new machine will still improve productivity. And a new machine for a serious user now would almost certainly be equipped with multiple displays while five years ago that was still fairly uncommon.
This isn't a tech problem. Therefore it can't be solved with tech. You don't allow information that you are obligated to protect the privacy of leave your control. Doesn't matter if it is android, a laptop or a briefcase full of files. The other option is roll the dice and hope you aren't there when the press show up to cover the breach. Choose. And if your boss insists you do it anyway make the sum-bitch put the order in writing so your butt is covered when the poop hits the fan. Because sooner or later... BOOM!
Staff should not be mobile with private information unless absolutely required to do their job and the number of those people haven't changed a lot. Field work is still field work and office is still the office. And the solutions haven't changed a lot either. Avoid copying more information to a portable device than absolutely required to do the job. And with today's connectivity live connection to a remote app is usually the way to go. Only at the edges can tech play a role. Design it right, control it right and you won't get bit in the ass when (not if) the crypto and other fancy tech fails in the hands of end users.
Nah, he used it in the modern corporate sense. If sales aren't going up, Up, UP every quarter then they might as well be dead. Smaller players will begin to pull out, big players will see their share prices tank, etc. Tech companies are structured on the basis of ever growing sales and profits so the idea of a nice stable market would be death to them and they probably won't have time to restructure.
Longer term, sales will probably go down. For a long time millions and millions of people who had no business buying a PC were buying them because of the Windows monopoly, to get access to basic things like email, word processing and basic web/media consumption. Those users are going to finally go away and stop demanding that the PC be turned into what they wanted all along, a simple device without confusing options, flexibility or programability.
But people who always needed the power of a PC will continue needing one so they aren't going to go away.
Translation: Security/privacy is just a joke. We will waste a little tax money on security theater and fattening up a preferred vendor but we really don't care. Give me the shiny toy.
> YOU DON'T ALLOW ANYBODY TO WORK WITH IT OR LOOK AT IT.
No, you have to assume your own people are somewhat safe, at least at the level of access you grant each one. Although you also have audit trails of who accesses/changes what to keep everyone honest.
But the second it leaves the front door you aren't trusting the user anymore, you are trusting the user to be able to retain possession in a hostile environment. Or you are trusting them to actually use the secure features correctly. Do you deal with end users? It only takes ONE to screw up.
BYOD fails before you even start, the premise is broken. I'm expected to secure a device I don't own or even have ultimate control of? Eh? And if the user was skilled enough to do all that stuff, or even understand why circumventing the security policy is a bad idea, he/she would probably be working in IT.
You might make it work somewhat if you only allow web apps or similar remote viewing access with no information ever stored on the uncontrolled device but even that has problems. Security access tokens vulnerable, screen caps, cut/paste, etc.
Nice propeller spinning but forget all that crap and lets get real.
If you want to enforce privacy of information you do two simple things.
YOU DON"T F*CKING ALLOW IT TO WALK OUT THE FRONT DOOR.
YOU DON"T ALLOW IT TO BE MOVED TO DEVICES OUTSIDE OF YOUR DIRECT CONTROL.
So just say no to BYOD, let em screech and bitch all they want. Tell em straight up, if your can't work without your precious iPad then go find an employer who doesn't need to deal with laws enforcing privacy. And good luck with that in this crappy economy. Just say no to portable devices, period, unless there is a truly compelling need. Data collection and off site archiving come to mind.
Otherwise admit you really don't care about privacy at all and get on with it and, again, you don't need to spend a lot of money on tech that won't actually work when it comes to crunch time with end user idiots.
So? It still resolves down to misunderstanding exactly what is meant by 'admin'. Whoever has admin/root can do whatever they darned well want.... or at least until the DRM hammer falls. But because they don't want end users to understand that they are blowing smoke up everyone's butt and removing a feature most of us consider a waste of cycles and memory but some people actually like.
Not at all. What did I just speak of that isn't a firm matter of record? Not a conspiracy theory, not secret knowledge known only to the select, open source information available to all.... but furiously ignored by most because to look would require action.
Read Mr. Obama's written works. Sure he had a lot of help from ghost writers but the contents can certainly be taken as representing how he wants to be viewed. He gives the game away but nobody actually read either of his books, they just bought them and displayed them to be seen as 'hip' and 'informed.' Now read a few more very public sources of information. Go read some of the history of his parents, both what is in Jr.s books and elsewhere. Dad was thrown out of a socialist (proudly, avowedly socialist) government in Kenya for being too extreme. Not extreme as in capitialist running dog lackey of the colonialists, the other extreme. Saying Mom was just a crazy hippy fellow traveller would be an understatement. The white grandparents were at least fellow travellers and lets not forget card carrying Frank Marshal Davis, the substitute father figure/mentor.
Obama himself writes about being proud of hanging with the marxists, hippies, etc. so as not to be seen as a 'sellout.' Uh huh. So not a communist. And yes in-godamned-deed he was a paidup member of the New Party. And 'Rev' Wright was part of an unholy trinity of himself, a socialist pretending to be a protestant minister, Phlager pretending to be a priest and Farakan pretending to be a muslim. Go read Wright's holy book: hint, it ain't the Holy Bible it is by a Professor Cone. A bit hard to find the actual books about now but plenty of excerpts online to give ya the flavor.
As for being muslim to communist, again go to the words of Mr. Obama himself and the few bit of paper trail we have. He was enrolled in school to receive religious training as a muslim by his stepfather. The only known religious instruction he received as a child was that. As an adult we know of no conversion to another traditional religious sort of faith, thus I feel justified in assuming he is still a communist. Again, Rev. Wright doesn't count as Christian. Have you read that 'church's' statement of principles? I have. It mentions 'Africa' many times, to zero for Jesus. Call me crazy but I haven't seen a Christian church that managed to skip the whole Christ part.
TB was pretty much a solved problem in the 1st world. Then we decided we couldn't force people into quarantine to ensure they got proper treatment and to prevent the spread of such a readily transmissible disease. And then AIDS pitched in to help brew up especially virilent strains in immune compromised patients with no self control. Add in the general problem if drug resistence and we have a major epidemic waiting to happen. Who knows where it will go nuts, but sooner or later... BAM!
Best I can tell from what passes as thought in the politically correct set, diseases got rights or something. Or people got the right to not get treated and to pass on the crap they catch. I really can't decipher it.
But don't worry, this is all the evil Republican's fault. ObamaCare^WTax will fix all these problems.
> Your definition of "innovate" is apparently so narrow that even somebody building a fucking rocket isn't "innovating" because "you know...
No, I'd say it wasn't too innovative if you just bought rocket motors, gyros, etc. off the shelf and stuck em on a slightly differently shaped body and launched it AFTER Sputnik. Which was what the iPod was. They bought hdds off the rack, put em in a bog standard plastic body with a quite typical display and added in a scroll wheel they licensed from somebody else. They introduced it into a market already full of portable digital music players of various sorts. All they added was the look of the case, the software, the iTunes store and a big heaping helping of the patented RDF. The rest was, as I said, productizing and marketing.
Which was why we have the meme around here "no Wifi, less storage than a Nomad; lame" Cmdr. Taco underestimated the power of marketing over innovation just like Steve Jobs did all those years ago when Microsoft's inferior products were kicking his butt. Steve learned from that.
So? Note the phrase "American parents" in that. His parents were American citizens at the time Mitt was born and he was born on US soil. The Natural Born clause does not require that the parents be themselves born here, only that they be Citizens at the time. At the time I don't think the concept of dual citizenship existed so if the parents were citizens the child couldn't have any other loyalties. The better question mark is Rubio: there is some debate as to when his parents achieved US Citizenship.
There is a good question of how George Romney was qualified to run in 1964 but his candidacy was so brief that apparently no real oppo research was initiated against him so the subject never came up. But even then, both parents were American Citizens with undivided loyalty even if the child was born while abroad. We have already enshrined the notion that being born outside the strictly defined territory of the US can be acceptable when by unamious decree of Congress it was determined that Senator McCain was qualified for the office even though he was born at a U.S. Navy facility located on foreign soil. None were willing to publicly dispute that the offspring of a U.S. Naval Officer on active duty service to the United States qualifies regardless of where born but it does put the proverbial camel's nose under the tent.
> Everyone expects some radical change that no one has thought of, but that has never ever happened in the consumer space.
Sure it happens. Just not very often, and as I said originally, sometimes even from Apple. The Apple ][ was innovative, new and a breakthrough. Little of the actual tech was invented by Steve & Steve but the idea of making a whole machine (unlike say the Altair and other contemporary units) for retail consumption was a fairly new idea at the time. All of the tech in the original Mac came from elsewhere (mostly PARC) but it was still a big departure from what was selling before.
But the iProducts of late not so much. Nothing in the iPod was invented at Apple and except for being the first to get ahold of the new 1.8" form factor HDDs (invented by others), the scroll wheel (licensed tech) and the very old idea of a walled garden was a late comer to the portable digital music player market. I guess the notion of selling the walled garden as a feature instead of a bug is a sort of dark innovation. The iPhone certainly didn't break much ground in the smartphone space, that was well established by Microsoft, RIM, Palm and others by the time Apple showed up. The iPad was nothing but a bigger iPhone. Apple of course blew the size of those markets right through the roof with their productizing and marketing prowess. It is what they do now, take other people's innovation and make the 'product you guys should have made' and sell millions and millions of em.
So lets get this right. Not only is Microsoft planning innovate for the first time, they plan to go right to out innovating Apple... as if THEY[1] do much of it themselves but whatever. And not only that they are going to suddenly be innovating on 'all fronts.' Can't wait to see this plan fail.
[1] Apple productizes. Apple markets. They even integrate well. But mostly they are a design and marketing company.
> Unless Obama really is Satan incarnate (or a socialist Kenyan Muslim terrorist,
> I'm not sure which is worse), then there's not too much to worry about
I'd say from the available evidence that Obama is most likely a communist/socialist with Muslim roots in much the way that most American socialists have Christian roots. But communism is a religion (albiet a godless one) so you can't really be one AND a theist. Not a terrorist but sympathetic to their goals and like most of the professional left seem enamored with violent anti-liberal thugs to the point of making excuses for their violent means of achieving their ends. Because in their secret hearts they lack only the public support to use violent means themselves.
He wasn't born in Kenya but unless the reason for hiding the birth cert is to hide a dark family secret, he is not a Natural Born Citizen in the sense of the requirement to be POTUS. Being born in HI makes him an American Citizen but it requires both parents to be a citizen at the time of birth to qualify as Natural Born and BHO Sr. was not and was never known to have even contemplated naturalization.
The natural born requirement was designed to prevent people with divided loyalty from being entrusted with the fairly unrestrained powers of POTUS. Due to his 'imteresting' biography Mr. Obama can rightly claim Kenyan, British, Indonesian or American Citizenship and or travel papers. What part of that implies 'undivided loyalty' to you?
Which is why I only clicked to the actual EO before commenting. I already knew what sort of breathless 'black helicopter' crap would await at the EPIC link. Amazing the vortex of stupid that can happen when Libertarians and the Left converge on an issue.
> but I have to admit that Clinton was a pretty good President.
Look back at the first two years and imagine that extending out to eight and you wouldn't say that. It was Clinton tempered by the Newt that turned out pretty good. Either one was unstable by themself but somehow they made it work. In other words, we got lucky. Obama is proof that sort of thing can't be relied upon and that electing dysfunctional poster children of the Oprah Generation is a really bad idea. Not sure swinging the pendelum all the way to a straight laced ramrod up his butt boy scout like Romney is a good reaction to the problem but since that is the only choice remaining....