MS Orifice uses an interface called a "ribbon", which hides functionality from me and requires me to take my hands off the keyboard and use the mouse.
Every time that I have to use this, it fails the test of "can I be productive in this environment before I can copy 'PortableLibreOffice' from my memory stick onto the machine in question, and get on with work?"
MS Office always fails, because of it's "revolutionary" interface. I am not willing to distract myself from doing productive work, to learn some idiot's mouse-ridden idea of "productive". It is quicker to install a known working environment and get on with some work. I submit print-ready reports as PDFs, not "to be edited by someone trying to cover things up" documents.
You would think programmers would be more comfortable with computers.
Possibly they want people who are going to understand computing, rather than people who know how to use a [insert fad application/ appliance/ paradigm of the decade]?
My industry is absolutely riddled with people who are "specialists", who know how to run a piece of software, but do not understand what the software does, how it works, or how it interacts with the physical reality of the universe (or the misunderstandings of other people working for other companies, using other software which differently misunderstands different aspects of the same physical reality, and attempts to exchange data concerning that reality using incompatible, proprietary data structures). I'm on a training course with 20-odd of them this week, and only 2 or 3 actually understand the problems we're being faced with, rather than trying to understand how to make their software work.
Doesn't fuss me. Sorting out the mess keeps me in employment. And I make sure that I CAN do my work with a hand-lens, a pocket torch, and a sharp pencil.
My GPS, a TomTom Via 220 (I think that's the model)... well, I got an email from TomTom saying that there was a MANDATORY SOFTWARE UPDATE. They warned that the gps would stop working a week later if the flash wasn't done.
How would the device know that there was a software update? Do TomTom have access to the stream of signals from the GPS satellites to all GPS devices, whether or not made by TomTom, and include a way to brick them too? What would happen if some non-US military power hacked into this communications channel through GPS signals and sent out a virus to all US military GPS devices turning them off? then the US military would be blind, and the Foreign Power (TM) could invade at will.
Or is there possibly some other communications channel into the device which TomTom intend using? In which case, just disable that channel. Then TomTom can't brick your device. "No communications channel" equals "no malware entry route."
What input does a GPS device need other than a GPS radio signal? Oh, and power (available from Chinese batteries at a store near you).
I would say that the appropriate place to put a "sunshade", if it were necessary (a very different question to "how best to do sunshading"), would be to put things in the Lagrangian L1 point of the Sun-Earth system. Which is about 1.5 million km towards the Sun - significantly beyond the major influence of the Moon.
It's not exactly stable ; but the fuel use to maintain station is decidedly lower. Which is why there are several satellites places at Lagrangian points. And, of course, there's no need to build a "ring" : anything at (or reasonably near to) the L1 point will automatically stay between the sun and the Earth.
Say that you need to reduce solar illumination by 2% at Earth. So, you need around 2.5 million sq.km of interception material at the L1 point. To construct a "ring" with the same coverage in LEO, it needs to be around 200km wide by 53000km long (1000km-high orbit). which is 10.5 to 11 million sq.km of interception material.
The tensile strength you'd need in anchor wires to maintain the system in a relatively stable orbit... may be within the realm of "beanstalk" materials rather than scrith. But of course, such a "ring" isn't stable - you did know that?
Why should I? I've had one from MAIL.RU for years. Helps cut down on the spam.
Yandex and mail.ru cross-advertise so heavily that I assume they're the same company.
Happy to see such responsiveness from the designers.
There is quite a building curve there for both software and hardware sides of the design. Building the basic machine with the symmetry to be able to handle left- and right-handed use in the the same chassis is going to be one thing (in terms of costs of parts and complexity of the chassis). The exterior moulding is going to be asymmetrical (which means 2 different SKUs ; 4 when you're looking at adult and child versions - though what do you need adult versions for? Most adults who're going to be able to learn to write are going to have ossified habits by the time of achieving adult size, surely?).
The software is going to be challenging for both processing power requirements and battery power.
It's an interesting project. But probably doomed to long-term irrelevance - speech recognition is "ha-ha, but serious", and the complete death of hand-writing is probably a couple of generations in the future. My industry is very likely to last longer (materials will be needed).
In the late 1990's someone proclaimed that there was nothing more to invent,
I think that you'll find that you're referring to the 1890s. And being slightly more specific, I think the story has been attributed to Lord Kelvin (he of thermodynamics and, errrr, the Kelvin S.I. unit).
But I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find that it's been told repeatedly with other people in the frame.
FYI, water, which you'll have to carry anyway, makes pretty good shielding.
To expand slightly on that...
The Earth's atmosphere provides adequate shielding against solar plus cosmic radiation to keep the error rate in our gene transcription low enough to survive. (If it didn't, we'd all be two-headed monsters with leukaemia, instead of only having the one Zaphod Beeblebrox.). The atmosphere consists of a certain amount of matter above our heads, and it doesn't much matter what chemical form that matter takes. I normally estimate that amount by looking at my scuba diving manual : the pressure at 10m (30ft, approx) in water is twice that at the surface (Which is why your decompression tables have a LOT of decco time in those top 10m.), so the amount of matter providing "one atmosphere" of shielding is equivalent to that at 10m in water. For a 1sq.m area, that's 10 tonnes.
Which is pretty large. BUT, proportionately, the larger your ship, the smaller a proportion of your mass this makes up, because you only need this around the exterior of the ship. So, for long duration travel, bigger is better. (Which you probably need to avoid sending your crew insane anyway.)
Water is fine. Water as ice (from a comet / asteroid) is fine. There's no reason to not use some of it as a hydroponic system (you'll need something for food, something to recycle carbon dioxide back into oxygen, might as well use some of it for shielding too). OK, I can't think of a show-stopper reason - feel free to think of any you can.
But rock (including as dust in bags, if necessary) is pretty much as good. Same mass, to a first approximation (different nuclei have different capture cross sections for different radiation particles, but that's a relatively small effect compared to plain old mass).
Being constantly reprimanded by squiggly red lines that I the software thinks that [...] is enough to make me gouge out my eyes with a vibrating pen.
Surely it would be more appropriate to gouge out the eyes of the programmer who wrote the code. Or even better, the manager and marketing morons who thought it would be a good idea.
Though the programmers who make assumptions about the language and preferences of users without providing a way for users to change the configuration, do deserve... well, a clue-by-four, if not an eye-gouging. That's just poor programming. Maybe just one eye gouged?
My main question on the product... the name sounds very Germanic... And indeed, it is:
The video in German below shows off the Lernstift prototype.
So hopefully the process of producing English language versions should beat most of the translation and assumption problems out of the system.
There will, of course, be a left-handed version? I think I'd better ask them... email prepared, and will be getting a link to this message.
Some workplaces mandate that you're not allowed to discuss your salary on penalty of being fired.
That sounds like an absolutely excellent company to be leaving as fast as possible. Or even better, not joining.
In the (fairly unlikely) event that I had to go job-hunting again, seeing that sort of thing in a contract proposal would have me rolling on the floor, helpless with mirth, followed by walking out of the meeting. Not a lot of point with continuing with the employment discussion if the company has arseholes like that working there.
It would require a ring of about ten orbital canons spaced around the Earth's equator, firing every hour for roughly 20 years. (assuming a 100KG shell with aluminum or similar reflective pieces in it).
Hmmm, I'm wondering what that translates to in terms of launches of solar power panels and automated processing plants to the Moon, and then building and launching the sunshade / power plant from there. Or maybe doing the same task using material (including volatiles) from an asteroid.
We need to practice moving asteroids now. Before we need to use it. We may not get as much warning of the next major impactor as the dinosaurs got.
Telescope? Bah. Use it to focus sunlight and bam! Interstellar death ray.
I think that you need to revisit your calculations. Unless you're aware of a second star in the Solar System which has previously escaped attention. (It might need to be within the orbit of Pluto - my calculations aren't particularly precise.)
Oh, you'd also need a target organism which is improbably sensitive to solar radiation. Very improbably, considering how much of the stuff is about in the Solar System.
Earth *was* calculated to be at the inner edge of the habitable zone even before this study.
Pretty much as soon as astronomy developed to the stage that we could seriously model and attempt to understand the atmospheres of other planets - specifically Mars and Venus - it has been pretty obvious that the inner boundary of the Sun's "habitable zone" (itself not a clearly defined concept, at that time) lays somewhere between the Earth's orbit and Venus' orbit.
(I should, strictly, add that the above statement applies to the the current orbits of Earth, Venus and Mars ; during the same period of astronomical research it has become clear that the orbits may be chaotic and subject to change on epochal timescales (giga-years).)
Whether Mars is in the Sun's "habitable zone" or not is a bit of a moot point. The big problem with Mars' habitability isn't it's location, but it's size. It's too small ; it cooled too quickly ; it's mantle stopped overturning to release volatiles to the surface and it's core has become too viscous to produce a significant magnetic field, allowing the atmosphere to be eroded by UV radiation from the sun. A bigger planet in Mars' orbit may have had a significantly different outcome. But there's not enough material in the inner solar system to make a bigger planet there, so it's going to remain a thought experiment.
I expect that somewhere in this thread there will be people talking about terraforming Mars. Not going to happen. It's not worth the effort.
Unfortunately we are a small free software company.
That probably puts you into the EFF's area of competence.
If they don't have continuing cases of this sort, they probably know of other people in your situation - approximate or precise - and will know who is already dealing with related cases. There's probably no need to go around re-inventing the legal wheel on this, and joining up with some other people who are being attacked by these trolls is likely to reduce individual costs and beat the trolls harder.
It's work-related addresses. Creativity, humour and fun are not relevant here (arguable exception if creativity, humour or fun are your business). Most people have mail clients that automatically recognise addresses in your address book, so length doesn't really matter.
Allowing variations on the order of components should help to drop the collision rate towards the negligible. Potential collisions should be fixable by a semi-automated process, particularly if the recruiting department collects the information early.
Give them options to forward automatically and one will complain what it looks like.
At work, we ban mail forwarding. Absolutely ban it. Our mail system simply does not have the option presented to the user to forward mail. It is not allowed. The ability does not exist.
If you are going to receive work-related email, you must sign into the work's email system. No ifs, no buts, no questions, it is spelled out as bluntly as that in the employee handbook, and you accepted it when you signed the contract.
And if our people don't tell you that "you're flying to X, to do Y, for Z, at time P, from airport Q", then that's our fault. And if our email system loses the mail, that's our fault. And if you don't log in to check your mail sufficiently regularly, that's your fault (and a disciplinary offence).
But if you set up your work email to forward to (say) GMail, and GMail loses (or delays) the email, and you miss your flight (costing the company thousands of dollars which we can't re-bill to a client)... into whose arsehole do we insert the cattle prod? GMail do not guarantee delivery of mail - no-one does. Even our own IT department doesn't guarantee delivery of email. But while it is in-house, we can cattle-prod them (and they can point to the demands they've been making for a new server for EHO...).
Official school business email account? I'd expect forwarding to be banned, for precisely the reasons above.
Speaking as a geologist, there are only so many non-renewable fuel resources in the world. Leaving aside other issues (such as, what DOES happen if you dump peta-tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere - an experiment which has been carried out repeatedly before humans started the current one), when there is no more oil in the ground, no more coal in the ground, and no more uranium in the ground (footnote), then the only thing left WILL be the renewable resources.
So, at some point, your descendants will have to learn how to live on renewable energy resources only. There really is no alternative.
[Footnote.] Strictly, it doesn't have to wait that long. When the energy needed to extract the last little bits of coal, oil and/ or uranium from the ground becomes greater than the energy that would be gained from that energy resource, then it is no longer viable, regardless of how much people are willing to pay for it. So, there will be oil etc left in the ground. But it won't be worth extracting. An unwelcome reminder for some people is that pipes in the ground a.k.a. oil wells do require maintenance and do corrode, so do not have an infinite lifespan to pay back the energetic investment that they represent.
It was adapted for a disabled driver with no foot control - the brake and accelerator pedals (it was an automatic - the first I ever saw or drove) were hooked up through push-me/pull-you cables to a hand grip so that you pulled it towards you to accelerate and pushed it away to brake. So, if you braked hard and were thrown forward, you'd brake even harder.
Felt weird, but it worked. No weirder than using left foot to change gear and right hand for clutch control.
When my local LUG - actually, no, it was a TechMeetUp, not the LUG - had a meeting with some local gageteers and academics who were using the nice new RPi and the well-established Arduinos for various "robotics"-like things, one of the things that differentiated the two platforms clearly was that the Arduinos that they were using had a host of data interfaces available, while the RPi doesn't have anything like as many. But, in terms of computational grunt, the RPi beat the Arduinos hands down (per price, at least).
So, their general ideas were around using Arduinos for actually controlling their existing robot designs (actuating motors with one interface, reading sensors with different interfaces), but to use the RPi to provide more braincells on board the robot to improve autonomy, increase functionality.
Who cares about the desktop, desktop computers are dead and gone.
Bullshit.
Machines that sit on a desk, plugged into the mains, plugged into the network, and often running a second monitor, are still very much the bedrock of the office environment. Granted a lot of classical desktops are being replaced by laptops with a monitor (and often a keyboard and a proper mouse), but that still leaves a lot of classical cuboid desktop boxes. Often beige.
Phones and tablets may be sexy, but if you've ever tried designing a spreadsheet to doing some complex calculations on a tablet... it's not an orgasmic experience.
I don't know. Do restaurants offer WiFi? I've never taken a computer into one, because I go to restaurants with the wife and/ or friends.
Within my house and offices, wired ports are always available. Ditto hotel rooms, IME.
But if that's your usage case, then yes, you need to name and shame those braindead manufacturers... (damned UI has taken away the context of my reply now... and this fucking work's machine doesn't seem to do page history (some piece of shit called "IE"))... whoever it was needs to name and shame.
Slashdot Mirror
MS Orifice uses an interface called a "ribbon", which hides functionality from me and requires me to take my hands off the keyboard and use the mouse.
Every time that I have to use this, it fails the test of "can I be productive in this environment before I can copy 'PortableLibreOffice' from my memory stick onto the machine in question, and get on with work?"
MS Office always fails, because of it's "revolutionary" interface. I am not willing to distract myself from doing productive work, to learn some idiot's mouse-ridden idea of "productive". It is quicker to install a known working environment and get on with some work. I submit print-ready reports as PDFs, not "to be edited by someone trying to cover things up" documents.
Possibly they want people who are going to understand computing, rather than people who know how to use a [insert fad application/ appliance/ paradigm of the decade]?
My industry is absolutely riddled with people who are "specialists", who know how to run a piece of software, but do not understand what the software does, how it works, or how it interacts with the physical reality of the universe (or the misunderstandings of other people working for other companies, using other software which differently misunderstands different aspects of the same physical reality, and attempts to exchange data concerning that reality using incompatible, proprietary data structures). I'm on a training course with 20-odd of them this week, and only 2 or 3 actually understand the problems we're being faced with, rather than trying to understand how to make their software work.
Doesn't fuss me. Sorting out the mess keeps me in employment. And I make sure that I CAN do my work with a hand-lens, a pocket torch, and a sharp pencil.
How would the device know that there was a software update? Do TomTom have access to the stream of signals from the GPS satellites to all GPS devices, whether or not made by TomTom, and include a way to brick them too? What would happen if some non-US military power hacked into this communications channel through GPS signals and sent out a virus to all US military GPS devices turning them off? then the US military would be blind, and the Foreign Power (TM) could invade at will.
Or is there possibly some other communications channel into the device which TomTom intend using? In which case, just disable that channel. Then TomTom can't brick your device. "No communications channel" equals "no malware entry route."
What input does a GPS device need other than a GPS radio signal? Oh, and power (available from Chinese batteries at a store near you).
It's not exactly stable ; but the fuel use to maintain station is decidedly lower. Which is why there are several satellites places at Lagrangian points. And, of course, there's no need to build a "ring" : anything at (or reasonably near to) the L1 point will automatically stay between the sun and the Earth.
Say that you need to reduce solar illumination by 2% at Earth. So, you need around 2.5 million sq.km of interception material at the L1 point. To construct a "ring" with the same coverage in LEO, it needs to be around 200km wide by 53000km long (1000km-high orbit). which is 10.5 to 11 million sq.km of interception material.
The tensile strength you'd need in anchor wires to maintain the system in a relatively stable orbit ... may be within the realm of "beanstalk" materials rather than scrith. But of course, such a "ring" isn't stable - you did know that?
s/Samsung/UFEI-implementing manufacturer/
As I RTFS (I'm off to RTFA now), potentially any UEFI system with this constraint is going to be vulnerable to this.
Same substitution through the rest of your comment.
Why should I? I've had one from MAIL.RU for years. Helps cut down on the spam. Yandex and mail.ru cross-advertise so heavily that I assume they're the same company.
There is quite a building curve there for both software and hardware sides of the design. Building the basic machine with the symmetry to be able to handle left- and right-handed use in the the same chassis is going to be one thing (in terms of costs of parts and complexity of the chassis). The exterior moulding is going to be asymmetrical (which means 2 different SKUs ; 4 when you're looking at adult and child versions - though what do you need adult versions for? Most adults who're going to be able to learn to write are going to have ossified habits by the time of achieving adult size, surely?).
The software is going to be challenging for both processing power requirements and battery power.
It's an interesting project. But probably doomed to long-term irrelevance - speech recognition is "ha-ha, but serious", and the complete death of hand-writing is probably a couple of generations in the future. My industry is very likely to last longer (materials will be needed).
Oh I am.
The last time I looked, this was Slashdot, with a subtext of "News for Nerds, stuff that matters", not a party.
I think that you'll find that you're referring to the 1890s. And being slightly more specific, I think the story has been attributed to Lord Kelvin (he of thermodynamics and, errrr, the Kelvin S.I. unit).
But I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find that it's been told repeatedly with other people in the frame.
FTFY. It's a small difference, but important.
To expand slightly on that ...
The Earth's atmosphere provides adequate shielding against solar plus cosmic radiation to keep the error rate in our gene transcription low enough to survive. (If it didn't, we'd all be two-headed monsters with leukaemia, instead of only having the one Zaphod Beeblebrox.). The atmosphere consists of a certain amount of matter above our heads, and it doesn't much matter what chemical form that matter takes. I normally estimate that amount by looking at my scuba diving manual : the pressure at 10m (30ft, approx) in water is twice that at the surface (Which is why your decompression tables have a LOT of decco time in those top 10m.), so the amount of matter providing "one atmosphere" of shielding is equivalent to that at 10m in water. For a 1sq.m area, that's 10 tonnes.
Which is pretty large. BUT, proportionately, the larger your ship, the smaller a proportion of your mass this makes up, because you only need this around the exterior of the ship. So, for long duration travel, bigger is better. (Which you probably need to avoid sending your crew insane anyway.)
Water is fine. Water as ice (from a comet / asteroid) is fine. There's no reason to not use some of it as a hydroponic system (you'll need something for food, something to recycle carbon dioxide back into oxygen, might as well use some of it for shielding too). OK, I can't think of a show-stopper reason - feel free to think of any you can.
But rock (including as dust in bags, if necessary) is pretty much as good. Same mass, to a first approximation (different nuclei have different capture cross sections for different radiation particles, but that's a relatively small effect compared to plain old mass).
Surely it would be more appropriate to gouge out the eyes of the programmer who wrote the code. Or even better, the manager and marketing morons who thought it would be a good idea.
Though the programmers who make assumptions about the language and preferences of users without providing a way for users to change the configuration, do deserve ... well, a clue-by-four, if not an eye-gouging. That's just poor programming. Maybe just one eye gouged?
My main question on the product ... the name sounds very Germanic ... And indeed, it is :
So hopefully the process of producing English language versions should beat most of the translation and assumption problems out of the system.
There will, of course, be a left-handed version? I think I'd better ask them ... email prepared, and will be getting a link to this message.
That sounds like an absolutely excellent company to be leaving as fast as possible. Or even better, not joining.
In the (fairly unlikely) event that I had to go job-hunting again, seeing that sort of thing in a contract proposal would have me rolling on the floor, helpless with mirth, followed by walking out of the meeting. Not a lot of point with continuing with the employment discussion if the company has arseholes like that working there.
Hmmm, I'm wondering what that translates to in terms of launches of solar power panels and automated processing plants to the Moon, and then building and launching the sunshade / power plant from there. Or maybe doing the same task using material (including volatiles) from an asteroid.
We need to practice moving asteroids now. Before we need to use it. We may not get as much warning of the next major impactor as the dinosaurs got.
I think that you need to revisit your calculations. Unless you're aware of a second star in the Solar System which has previously escaped attention. (It might need to be within the orbit of Pluto - my calculations aren't particularly precise.)
Oh, you'd also need a target organism which is improbably sensitive to solar radiation. Very improbably, considering how much of the stuff is about in the Solar System.
Pretty much as soon as astronomy developed to the stage that we could seriously model and attempt to understand the atmospheres of other planets - specifically Mars and Venus - it has been pretty obvious that the inner boundary of the Sun's "habitable zone" (itself not a clearly defined concept, at that time) lays somewhere between the Earth's orbit and Venus' orbit.
(I should, strictly, add that the above statement applies to the the current orbits of Earth, Venus and Mars ; during the same period of astronomical research it has become clear that the orbits may be chaotic and subject to change on epochal timescales (giga-years).)
Whether Mars is in the Sun's "habitable zone" or not is a bit of a moot point. The big problem with Mars' habitability isn't it's location, but it's size. It's too small ; it cooled too quickly ; it's mantle stopped overturning to release volatiles to the surface and it's core has become too viscous to produce a significant magnetic field, allowing the atmosphere to be eroded by UV radiation from the sun. A bigger planet in Mars' orbit may have had a significantly different outcome. But there's not enough material in the inner solar system to make a bigger planet there, so it's going to remain a thought experiment.
I expect that somewhere in this thread there will be people talking about terraforming Mars. Not going to happen. It's not worth the effort.
That probably puts you into the EFF's area of competence.
If they don't have continuing cases of this sort, they probably know of other people in your situation - approximate or precise - and will know who is already dealing with related cases. There's probably no need to go around re-inventing the legal wheel on this, and joining up with some other people who are being attacked by these trolls is likely to reduce individual costs and beat the trolls harder.
Nothing to see here.
It's work-related addresses. Creativity, humour and fun are not relevant here (arguable exception if creativity, humour or fun are your business). Most people have mail clients that automatically recognise addresses in your address book, so length doesn't really matter.
Allowing variations on the order of components should help to drop the collision rate towards the negligible. Potential collisions should be fixable by a semi-automated process, particularly if the recruiting department collects the information early.
At work, we ban mail forwarding. Absolutely ban it. Our mail system simply does not have the option presented to the user to forward mail. It is not allowed. The ability does not exist.
If you are going to receive work-related email, you must sign into the work's email system. No ifs, no buts, no questions, it is spelled out as bluntly as that in the employee handbook, and you accepted it when you signed the contract.
And if our people don't tell you that "you're flying to X, to do Y, for Z, at time P, from airport Q", then that's our fault. And if our email system loses the mail, that's our fault. And if you don't log in to check your mail sufficiently regularly, that's your fault (and a disciplinary offence).
But if you set up your work email to forward to (say) GMail, and GMail loses (or delays) the email, and you miss your flight (costing the company thousands of dollars which we can't re-bill to a client) ... into whose arsehole do we insert the cattle prod? GMail do not guarantee delivery of mail - no-one does. Even our own IT department doesn't guarantee delivery of email. But while it is in-house, we can cattle-prod them (and they can point to the demands they've been making for a new server for EHO ...).
Official school business email account? I'd expect forwarding to be banned, for precisely the reasons above.
So, at some point, your descendants will have to learn how to live on renewable energy resources only. There really is no alternative.
[Footnote.] Strictly, it doesn't have to wait that long. When the energy needed to extract the last little bits of coal, oil and/ or uranium from the ground becomes greater than the energy that would be gained from that energy resource, then it is no longer viable, regardless of how much people are willing to pay for it. So, there will be oil etc left in the ground. But it won't be worth extracting. An unwelcome reminder for some people is that pipes in the ground a.k.a. oil wells do require maintenance and do corrode, so do not have an infinite lifespan to pay back the energetic investment that they represent.
It was adapted for a disabled driver with no foot control - the brake and accelerator pedals (it was an automatic - the first I ever saw or drove) were hooked up through push-me/pull-you cables to a hand grip so that you pulled it towards you to accelerate and pushed it away to brake. So, if you braked hard and were thrown forward, you'd brake even harder.
Felt weird, but it worked. No weirder than using left foot to change gear and right hand for clutch control.
So, their general ideas were around using Arduinos for actually controlling their existing robot designs (actuating motors with one interface, reading sensors with different interfaces), but to use the RPi to provide more braincells on board the robot to improve autonomy, increase functionality.
Helps?
Horses for courses.
Bullshit.
Machines that sit on a desk, plugged into the mains, plugged into the network, and often running a second monitor, are still very much the bedrock of the office environment. Granted a lot of classical desktops are being replaced by laptops with a monitor (and often a keyboard and a proper mouse), but that still leaves a lot of classical cuboid desktop boxes. Often beige.
Phones and tablets may be sexy, but if you've ever tried designing a spreadsheet to doing some complex calculations on a tablet ... it's not an orgasmic experience.
Within my house and offices, wired ports are always available. Ditto hotel rooms, IME.
But if that's your usage case, then yes, you need to name and shame those braindead manufacturers ... (damned UI has taken away the context of my reply now ... and this fucking work's machine doesn't seem to do page history (some piece of shit called "IE")) ... whoever it was needs to name and shame.